Alaska Airlines Flights Canceled Due to a Computer Network Outage

Alaska Airlines, along with its subsidiary Horizon Air, was forced to request a ground stop for all flights on Sunday due to a computer network outage.

Federal authorities kept Alaska and Horizon Air flights grounded until the Federal Aviation Administration lifted the stop at 2 AM ET on Monday.

In its statement, Alaska Airlines mentioned that the information technology outage was “impacting our operations.” The airline said on its website, “We are experiencing issues with our IT systems. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working to resolve the issues.” 

Although the computer outage has already been resolved, it continued to impact the airline’s schedule through Monday. In an earlier statement, Alaska already alerted its customers and said, “There will be residual impacts to our operation throughout the evening.”

More Than 150 Flights Affected

More than 150 flights were canceled since Sunday evening because of the computer network outage. On Monday, FlightAware recorded 84 cancellations and nearly 150 delayed flights.

The airline said in a statement, “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.”

Unexpected Failure

Regarding the cause of the outage, Alaska Airlines stated that  “a critical piece of multi-redundant hardware at our data centers, manufactured by a third-party, experienced an unexpected failure.” While it affected multiple key systems of the airline, there was no hacking involved. 

The incident is also unrelated to other events, such as the attack on Microsoft’s servers over the weekend.

Alaska is now working with its vendor to replace the faulty hardware at the data center.

Last year, almost all US airlines were affected by the major internet outage that canceled hundreds of flights. Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike’s sensor configuration update triggered a system crash that not only affected airlines but also medical facilities and even police forces around the globe. This incident showed Microsoft computers showing “blue screens of death.”