Alaska Airlines resumes operations after 8-hour long IT outage canceled hundreds of flights
KOMO, VIEWER HANDOUT, CNN
By Aaron Cooper, CNN
(CNN) — Alaska Airlines has resumed operations after a failure at a data center forced hundreds of its flights to be grounded Thursday night.
A ground stop for all Alaska Airlines flights and flights of its subsidiary, Horizon Air, was lifted at 11:30 p.m. PT, the airline said in a statement. The ground stop was requested by the airline about eight hours earlier as the IT outage began, the FAA said.
“Alaska Airlines is working to restore operations to normal as quickly and safely as possible,” the airline said Friday morning, noting more than 360 flights had been canceled during the outage. “Additional flight disruptions are likely as we reposition aircraft and crews throughout our network.”
The airline said the outage took place when “a failure occurred at our primary data center,” and noted it was “not a cybersecurity incident.”
Seattle–Tacoma International Airport, where Alaska Airlines is based, was particularly hard hit Thursday night.
“They were like, OK, we’re going to be taking off. It’s an hour and 58 to Burbank, and then we didn’t move,” passenger Wilder McCullough told CNN affiliate KOMO. “That is scary, to have an IT shut down, when people are trying to get in the air.”
She ended up going home and trying to fly on a different day, but many passengers waited in the airport for flights to resume.
“People were everywhere. They were sitting in the hallway on the floor. They were calling people. They were freaking out,” a different passenger said.
One traveler in Austin, Texas, said the Alaska Airlines gates there were also “jammed” as the delays piled up.
Alaska Airlines had a similar outage in July and one after a systems upgrade in April of 2024.
Alaska is the fifth largest US airline and flies 44 million passengers each year to 120 destinations in five countries, accoring to its website.
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CNN’s Jordan D. Brown and Martin Goillandeau contributed to this report.
