Alaska Airlines resumes flights after equipment failure at a data center grounds all its planes

Alaska Airlines has resumed flights after the failure of a critical piece of hardware forced the airline to ground all its planes for approximately three hours, but the effects will linger into Monday, the company announced.

The carrier issued a system-wide ground stop for Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air flights around 8 p.m. Pacific time Sunday. The stop was lifted at 11 p.m., the Seattle-based company said in a social media post. More than 150 flights have been canceled since Sunday evening. The FlightAware tracking site reported 84 cancellations and nearly 150 delays Monday.

“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,” the airline said in a statement.

A closer look at the cause

The airline said “a critical piece of multi-redundant hardware at our data centers, manufactured by a third-party, experienced an unexpected failure.” That affected several of the airlines key systems, but hacking was not involved, and the airline said the incident was not related to any other events like the attack involving Microsoft’s servers over the weekend or the recent cybersecurity event at its Hawaiian Airlines subsidiary in June.

The airline also said it is working with its vendor to replace the hardware at the data center.

Alaska Airlines led all airlines in cancellations Monday, according to FlightAware. Many of the cancellations were at the airline’s major hub of Seattle, but it also canceled flights at airports all over the country.

The Federal Aviation Administration website had confirmed a ground stop for all Alaska Airlines mainline and Horizon aircraft, referring to an Alaska Airlines subsidiary. But the FAA referred all questions to the airline Monday.

History of outages

There has been a history of computer problems disrupting flights in the industry, though most of the time the disruptions are only temporary. Airlines have large, layered technology systems, and crew-tracking programs are often among the oldest systems. They also rely on other systems to check in passengers and make pre-flight calculations about aircraft weight and balance. But some of the most widespread problems are often related to computer systems the airlines themselves don’t control.

Nearly every major U.S. airline had to cancel hundreds — if not thousands — of flights last year after a major internet outage that was blamed on a software update that cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike sent to Microsoft computers of its corporate customers, including many airlines.

The FAA caused all U.S. departures to be halted briefly in January 2023 when a system used to alert pilots to safety hazards failed. That was the first nationwide ground stop since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The agency blamed a contractor that it said accidentally deleted files while synchronizing the alert system and its backup.

One of the biggest individual airline tech problems was the December 2022 debacle that caused Southwest Airlines to cancel nearly 17,000 flights over a 15-day stretch. After a federal investigation of Southwest’s compliance with consumer-protection rules, the airline agreed to pay a $35 million fine as part of a $140 million settlement with the Transportation Department.

Southwest’s breakdown started during a winter storm, but the airline’s recovery took unusually long because of problems with a crew-scheduling system.

The air traffic controllers that direct flights in and out of the nation’s airports also rely on outdated technology that the Trump administration has proposed overhauling after a series of high-profile failures and crashes this year, especially at Newark Liberty International Airport. Congress included $12.5 billion for those upgrades in Trump’s overall budget bill, but officials have described that as only a down payment on the project.

Alaska Airlines in focus

The National Transportation Board last month credited the crew of Alaska Airlines flight 1282 with the survival of passengers when a door plug panel flew off the plane shortly after takeoff on Jan. 5, 2024, leaving a hole that sucked objects out of the cabin.

In September, Alaska Airlines said it grounded its flights in Seattle briefly due to “significant disruptions” from an unspecified technology problem that was resolved within hours.