Alaska Airlines hires Accenture to audit IT systems after global outage forced it to cancel quarterly earnings call

Alaska Airlines has announced that it has hired global consulting company Accenture to conduct a full-scale audit of its technology systems, following two major IT outages that have disrupted operations in recent months. The airline said the independent review will assess its entire technology ecosystem — including systems, standards, and operational processes — as part of a broader effort to strengthen reliability and prevent future breakdowns.

The decision comes on the heels of a massive system failure last week that grounded flights for eight hours, disrupting travel for more than 49,000 passengers and forcing the cancellation of over 400 flights across Alaska Airlines and its regional carrier Horizon Air. The incident was reportedly so severe that it prompted the airline to postpone its scheduled quarterly earnings call.

According to the Seattle-based carrier, the outage stemmed from a failure at its primary data center and was not the result of a cybersecurity breach. In a new regulatory filing, Alaska said that it does not plan to reschedule the third-quarter earnings call and will instead issue updated fourth-quarter guidance in early December, after assessing the full financial impact of the IT disruptions.

The company faced a similar outage in July, when a malfunction in a “critical piece of hardware” at one of its data centers led to an estimated $12 million hit to earnings, or about $0.10 per share.

Alaska noted that it has increased its IT infrastructure spending by nearly 80% since 2019, investing in redundant data centers and migrating customer-facing systems to cloud-based platforms. The airline operates a hybrid technology model, combining its own data centers with third-party cloud services.

The airline said the new audit aims to identify system vulnerabilities and establish stronger safeguards to ensure operational resilience moving forward.