Update: July 21, 2025, at 12:20 p.m. ET
After calling for a full ground stop for its fleet of planes
on Sunday, Alaska Airlines announced that more flight disruptions taking place on
Monday as the carrier remedies a failure in a critical piece of hardware at its
data centers.
According to FlightAware, Alaska canceled
83 or nine percent of its scheduled flights on Monday, while another 147 or 17 percent
were delayed. The carrier’s regional partner, Horizon Air, is also reportedly dealing
with flight disruptions.
“Additional flight disruptions are likely as we reposition
aircraft and crews throughout our network,” an Alaska spokesperson told Reuters.com.
“The IT outage is not related to any other current events, and it’s not a
cybersecurity event.”
“We are currently working with our vendor to replace the
hardware equipment at the data center,” the statement from Alaska concluded.
Original Text
Alaska Airlines resumed operations on Sunday night after an
IT outage grounded its fleet of planes for about three hours.
According to The New
York Post, the United States-based airline issued a system-wide ground stop
for Alaska and Horizon Air flights at approximately 8 p.m. PT on Sunday due to
an outage that affected its systems.
Alaska officials lifted the ground stop at around 11 p.m.
PT, but did not specify the nature of the IT outage.
“As we reposition our aircraft and crews, there will most
likely be residual impacts to our flights. It will take some time to get our
overall operations back to normal,” an airline official told the New York Post.
Alaska Airlines and its subsidiaries have dealt with at
least two technical outages that impacted service over the last two years, including
a weight system issue that grounded the entire fleet in April 2024, as well as
an IT system hack on Hawaiian Airlines in June.
On Sunday, Microsoft also revealed there were “active
attacks” on its server software used by government agencies and businesses. Alaska
did not comment on whether the two issues were related.
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