Alaska Airlines’ services resumed on Sunday following an IT outage that briefly grounded all flights for approximately three hours.
The airline resumed operations later on Sunday, but the company has warned of "residual impacts to our flights”.
The disruption is the second time that the US airline has halted flights in just over a year.
In April 2024, Alaska Airlines grounded all of its planes due to a problem with the system that calculates the weight and balance of its fleet.
Here’s everything we know about the outage and the flights affected:
What is going on?
The outage impacted operations on Sunday at approximately 8pm Pacific time, according to the airline. It did not provide details about the outage.
“We’re working to get our operations back on track today at Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air after a significant IT outage Sunday night resulted in a system-wide ground stop of flights, which was lifted at 11 p.m. Pacific,” Alaska Airlines told The Standard.
“A critical piece of multi-redundant hardware at our data centers, manufactured by a third-party, experienced an unexpected failure. When that happened, it impacted several of our key systems that enable us to run various operations, necessitating the implementation of a ground stop to keep aircraft in position. The safety of our flights was never compromised.”
The airline added: “The IT outage is not related to any other current events, and it’s not connected to the recent cybersecurity incident at Hawaiian Airlines. We are currently working with our vendor to replace the hardware equipment at the data center.”
Are any flights from the UK affected?
Alaska Airlines announced that “there will most likely be residual impacts to our flights” and “it will take some time to get our overall operations back to normal”.
Over 150 flights have been cancelled since Sunday evening, including 64 cancellations on Monday. More disruption is expected.
Alaska Airlines told The Standard: “We appreciate the patience of our guests whose travel plans have been disrupted. We’re working to get them to their destinations as quickly as we can. Before heading to the airport, we encourage flyers to check their flight status.”
The airline does not have direct flights to the UK.
