Grounded by IT: Lessons from the Alaska Airlines Outage

 

If it feels like déjà vu, you’re not alone. Just days after the AWS outage that took down parts of the internet early last week, airline giant Alaska Airlines had to ground all flights across its network due to a major IT failure. First the cloud, now the skies — it’s been a tough week for uptime. While Alaska Airlines quickly clarified that the issue wasn’t a cyberattack, it still highlights how fragile critical systems can be when even one piece of infrastructure goes down. A failure at the airline’s primary data center cascaded across multiple systems, halting flight operations and disrupting travelers nationwide.

For businesses that depend on enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other major information technology (IT) systems — whether that’s for logistics, finance, or customer service — this incident should feel very familiar. Because the truth is, it doesn’t take a massive airline to experience massive downtime.

So, what can companies learn from this?

1. Don’t rely on “primary” anything. Alaska’s issue started with a single data center. Whether you’re hosting ERP on-premises or in the cloud, redundancy isn’t optional anymore. Active-active data centers or multi-region cloud setups can prevent a single point of failure from turning into a full stop.
2. Test your disaster recovery plan — for real. Most organizations think they’re ready, but few have actually run a live failover test. Simulating a disaster once or twice a year is one of the best ways to uncover hidden dependencies and response gaps before they happen in production.
3. Monitor like your business depends on it (because it does). Real-time monitoring and predictive alerts can detect issues before users do. It’s not just about catching downtime — it’s about catching weak signals that something’s about to fail.
4. Communicate clearly when things go wrong. Even when your systems are down, your communication shouldn’t be. Customers and teams appreciate transparency, and that trust can make all the difference during a crisis.

The takeaway: prepare before you have to react.

Outages like these — whether from AWS, Alaska Airlines, or the next big headline — are reminders that resilience has to be built, not assumed. Every company relying on technology (which is basically every company) should be asking:

• Do we know how long we can afford to be down?
• When was our last DR test?
• Who gets called first when systems go offline?

If those answers aren’t clear, now’s the time to get ahead of it.

At Nogalis, we help organizations strengthen their IT and ERP environments through proactive server maintenance, disaster recovery planning, and 24/7 managed support. Because downtime doesn’t just cost money — it costs trust, momentum, and peace of mind. The next major outage will likely follow AWS and Alaska Airlines and make headlines. Let’s make sure it’s not yours. Contact us today for a free quote.