• The air cargo industry continues to grapple with the fallout of major IT outages, like the CrowdStrike incident and recent Alaska Airlines disruption, which exposed the sector’s vulnerability to system failures. As global air cargo demand reached a record high in 2024, even brief IT downtime now risks compounding operational, financial, and reputational damage.
• Critical systems such as crew scheduling, gate assignments, and weight/load balance are heavily interlinked, meaning minor disruptions can trigger cascading failures. The article emphasizes the urgent need for end-to-end IT observability and 24/7 monitoring to maintain network resilience and avoid future downtime.

Last year, the CrowdStrike outage affected IT systems globally, from airports to banks to hospitals, in what was dubbed the biggest IT outage in history. While the impact on people and consumer-facing businesses was widespread and highly publicised, the air cargo industry experienced unquantifiable knock-on effects. As an industry that relies on intricate, highly complex logistical systems, airfreight suffered a heavy hit with its recovery taking weeks in some cases, as cargo flights around the world were grounded. 

Fast forward one year and Alaska Airlines grounded its entire cargo and passenger fleet following an IT outage, in what the airline later revealed was an incident “caused by an unexpected failure of a critical piece of multi-redundant hardware at its data centers”. More than 200 flights were cancelled during the three-hour halt, affecting over 15,000 passengers. Given this, it’s not hard to imagine that the ripple effects on cargo operations were equally significant. 

These outages reveal just how unforgiving airfreight and airport systems can be when a disruption occurs in one part of the network environment. They also prove that no matter how strong an industry and its systems seem, none are immune from IT issues without the proper performance management tools in place. Yet, for a sector as vital as airfreight, system vulnerabilities are exacerbated due to the fragile nature of the goods supply chain. 

Compounding the issue is the fact that global air cargo demand reached an all-time high in 2024, up 11.3 percent year-on-year. However, capacity, which was already limited, increased by 7.4 percent year-on-year – spelling a disparity for supply to keep up with demand. This increased global demand, coupled with the effects of internal or third-party IT disruptions or outages, demonstrates the need for airfreight companies to update their processes and solutions to assure performance, availability, resiliency, and security of their IT environments. 

The risks of IT outages for air cargo carriers 

In an industry so instrumental to the functioning of the global supply chain, even minor disruptions in critical areas such as crew and flight scheduling, gate assignments, and weight and balance applications can quickly trigger a wave of negative effects in the interconnected IT systems. For instance, crew scheduling relies on the complex coordination of human resources and workflows. Any disruption to this process can lead to significant delays and incur substantial costs for not only air carriers, but also customers at the end of the supply chain. 

The aftereffects of these disruptions are extensive. Reputation, operational costs, and bottom-line revenue are all at stake. Any slowdown or unplanned downtime throughout the transportation process not only causes frustration for customers but erodes trust and can ultimately impact future revenue. Furthermore, it can significantly impact costs for air carriers, particularly due to staff-related expenses such as overtime or the need for additional personnel to deal with the repercussions. 

Preparation in the event of another outage 

To mitigate disruption to airfreight, IT teams must ensure that any recent maintenance or routine upgrades do not have any negative impact on airline systems so they can operate at optimal efficiency. Maintaining continuous monitoring involves proactively tracking systems before, during, and after IT maintenance, updates, or migrations. This helps airlines quickly resolve issues that may emerge from maintenance or upgrades, preventing financial and reputational losses. 

Through round-the-clock monitoring of its IT services and environment, air carriers can ensure their networks are performing as expected, available to employees and customers, and secure from threats. This monitoring must allow for full, packet-level visibility into every transaction that takes place across an organisation’s network if it is to ensure optimal performance and avoid negative effects on the organisation and its customers. For an industry well-versed in the importance of efficient delivery, it is easy to recognise the value of swiftly delivering every application packet. To truly ensure peak service delivery and a high-quality customer experience, air carriers need complete end-to-end visibility throughout their complex network domains and cloud ecosystems. 

To avoid downtime resulting from system outages – similar to what caused the aforementioned IT outages – as well as the accompanying chaos and disruption, air carrier and airport IT teams require complete end-to-end observability from every edge of the business into their network. Without this, they risk missing issues and being unable to resolve them before the business, employees, and customers are affected. Continuous monitoring of networks and applications – regardless of location – helps carriers respond quickly to whatever unknowns and uncertainties IT issues bring. 

Ensuring key business applications are resilient in the face of an outage requires preparation and rehearsal. These proactive measures are not just good practice – they are foundational processes in minimising the impact of an IT outage or even a cyberattack. This ensures IT experts benefit from the early identification of emerging issues, have detailed, real-time information to quickly pinpoint the cause of service disruptions, and can effectively reduce mean time to repair (MTTR). 

Ultimately, the importance of an efficiently operating network and application environment cannot be overstated for air carriers. When one hour of unplanned network downtime can represent thousands – if not millions – of pounds in losses, having the right network observability tools in place is invaluable. The key to having the right network visibility and observability is finding an IT provider that works in partnership with each and every customer to understand their infrastructure, their strategy and how they deliver services. This complete integration into its customers’ teams allows the provider to respond to IT incidents immediately, avoiding the need for reparative measures – financial, reputational or otherwise – altogether. In this way, the provider should go above and beyond for every customer, ensuring that they are fully supported regardless of the severity of the IT system issue they face.