After two hugely disruptive IT outages in four months, Alaska Airlines is bringing in outside experts to review its entire information technology infrastructure.

In July, an unexpected hardware failure at one of Alaska’s data centers grounded the airline’s fleet for three hours, kicking off four days of flight disruptions. That piece of hardware was multiredundant, Alaska said at the time, meaning both the hardware and its backup failed.

Then, on Thursday, another failure at Alaska’s “primary” data center grounded the airline’s fleet for roughly eight hours, forcing the cancellation of more than 400 flights Thursday and Friday, and impacting 49,000 passengers as of Friday afternoon.

“We know our guests put their trust in us when they choose to fly with Alaska, and this level of performance is not acceptable,” Alaska said in a statement Friday. “And while safety is our most critical responsibility, the reliability of our operations is an essential expectation of our guests.”

Alaska has not provided any details, or answered any questions, about what caused Thursday’s outage. It’s not clear if the two IT outages this year are related, or even if they occurred at the same data center. Alaska also did not specify if Thursday’s IT outage was hardware-related, like the one in July.

“Following a similar disruption earlier this year, we took action to harden our systems,” Alaska said in its Friday statement. “But this failure underscores the work that remains to be done to ensure system stability.”

“We are immediately bringing in outside technical experts to diagnose our entire IT infrastructure to ensure we are as resilient as we need to be,” Alaska continued.

The company postponed a scheduled call with Wall Street analysts Friday morning to, the company said, allow employees to focus on supporting travelers and getting operations back on track.

It did not yet have an estimate on the financial impact of Thursday’s outage or the ongoing flight disruptions, Alaska said in a statement Friday. Those losses will show up in the company’s fourth-quarter earnings later this year.

The earlier outage likely trimmed Alaska’s third-quarter earnings per share by about 10 cents, Alaska said in July.

At Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Alaska’s homebase, the airline canceled 115 flights Thursday and another 95 Friday, according to data from the flight tracking website FlightAware. Horizon Air, a regional airline and Alaska subsidiary, canceled 29 flights Thursday and another 12 Friday.

Hawaiian Airlines, which Alaska recently acquired, was not impacted by the outage. That indicates the ongoing effort to merge the two airlines likely did not lead to the data center failure, said Tiffany Funk, the founder of travel tech company point.me.

Funk, who is based in Spokane, Washington, said Thursday’s IT outage is a reminder of how fragile the air travel system can be. One glitch in one network can prevent dozens of planes from taking off. That, in turn, can prevent dozens of other planes from landing and taking off, leaving dozens of pilots, hundreds of flight attendants and thousands of passengers in the wrong place.

On top of that, airlines’ information systems are often a combination of new and old technology, with many airlines opting to bypass IT upgrades to spend money on other parts of the business, Funk said.

“We forget how many things have to go right in order for an airport to function,” she said. “Because it’s so amazingly complicated, it doesn’t actually take a lot for things to go very wrong very quickly.”

Those mishaps don’t affect the safety of travel, Funk said, they just add “friction to the system.” Thursday’s IT outage did not compromise the safety of Alaska or Horizon’s flights, the airline said.

But it did inconvenience a lot of passengers.

Some travelers were stuck waiting on tarmacs, others in long lines that snaked through airports to reach the customer service desk. Stranded travelers complained of a seven-hour wait time to speak to an agent on the phone. Those who were able to rebook flights said, in some cases, their new flight got canceled as well.

Andrew Moore was in Denver on a work trip and was scheduled to fly home to Seattle at 8 a.m. Friday. Alaska rebooked him twice and switched him from a direct route to one with two layovers.

“I woke up to basically getting kicked off it and rebooked for tomorrow,” Moore said. Now, he will only have one day at home before boarding another flight Monday.

Rebecca Jameson, who was scheduled to fly from Chicago to Seattle on Thursday afternoon, said it was clear at the terminal that the flight had been delayed. Alaska never updated its website or mobile app to reflect the change.

Airline staff periodically told travelers they were still hoping to board soon. About an hour into the delay, they started lining travelers up to board. Everyone clapped, Jameson said.

“But then they said they didn’t have a gate in Seattle, so we couldn’t leave.”

Finally, about four hours after its scheduled takeoff time, the flight was canceled. Airline staff gave Jameson a hotel voucher.

She was rebooked for a flight at 6 a.m., but woke up at 3 a.m. to another notification that her flight had been canceled. She tried to text customer service but was told she would have to call. When she did, she was told the wait time was nearly 10 hours.

Paul Schumacher was in the air approaching Sea-Tac, after a long flight from Nashville, when the crew announced there was an IT problem. There was no place to land at Sea-Tac; all of the gates were full of planes that couldn’t take off.

The flight rerouted to Paine Field in Everett.

“I guess lucky for us,” Schumacher said. “Others were getting sent to Spokane, Portland, wherever.”

But once they arrived at Paine Field, he said, things got more complicated.

“There’s a military term that starts with ‘cluster’ that ensued,” he said.

Schumacher needed to pick up his car at Sea-Tac. But the line for a voucher was at least 25 people long, he said, with only one customer service agent helping people. He ended up calling an Uber, which set him back about $135.

Alaska Airlines had sent passengers a message, telling them they could contact the airline to recoup any money spent because of the outage. Since 9 a.m. Friday, Schumacher said, he’s been trying to reach someone, but has been rerouted or put on hold several times.

He said he hopes Alaska’s board of directors will consider a “redundant” system in the future, one that backs up their IT system if it goes down.

“Yes, it is expensive,” he said. “But how much revenue have they lost in the past 24 hours, and how much goodwill have they wasted away?”

Funk, from point.me, doesn’t expect these IT outages will have a lasting impact on Alaska’s reputation among customers — even with all the flight disruptions, long phone calls and confusion about rebooking.

“Consumer sentiment is fickle,” she said. “There will probably be a soft hit, but people make travel choices based off schedule and network.”

Mike Arnot, a spokesperson for aviation analytics company Cirium, said Friday that these disruptions don’t change Alaska’s consistent performance, citing low cancellations and high on-time performance.

“Alaska Airlines is consistently one of the best airlines in North America for operational performance, month in and month out,” Arnot said. “These cancellations are an anomaly.”

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