Alaska Airlines was forced to ground planes nationwide after a major IT outage at the Seattle-based carrier crippled its operations late on Sunday evening.
The airline did not immediately explain the nature of the IT issues that had caused such chaos, but they were serious enough for the carrier to request a full ground stop for all Alaska Airlines flights from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
As well as mainline Alaska Airlines flights, the ground stop also affected all regional services operated by Horizon Air. The ground stop did not, however, include Hawaiian Airlines flights.
In a short statement posted to its official X account, Alaska Airlines said: “We are currently experiencing an IT outage that’s impacting our operations. We requested a temporary, system-wide ground stop until the issue is resolved.”
“We sincerely apologize to our guests for the inconvenience,” the statement continued.
Alaska Airlines did not provide further information as crowds quickly started to build at key hubs for the carrier, such as at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in Washington State.
“Hanging with a few thousand of my besties at Seattle Tacoma airport because of the Alaska Air grounding,” wrote one frustrated passenger on X, accompanied by a photo of disgruntled-looking flyers accepting their fate in the busy airport concourse.
Some reports suggest that the airline began experiencing the IT meltdown around 8 pm (PDT) and subsequently stopped boarding flights. The ground stop was lifted, and operations started resuming around three hours later.
Flight tracking website Flight Aware was still processing the number of flight cancellations caused by the ground stop, but reported that more than a quarter of Alaska’s scheduled flights on Sunday had been delayed as a result.
The grounding comes less than a month after Hawaiian Airlines admitted that it had fallen victim to what it described as a “cybersecurity event” that had affected some of its IT systems.
Hawaiian Airlines publicly broke the news on June 26 but reassured passengers that it had taken steps to secure its operational systems, and flights continued to operate.
The airline did not say how long its IT systems had been compromised before it finally detected the cyberattack. Nearly a month later, it still remains unclear whether hackers managed to gain unauthorized access to any of Hawaiian’s IT systems or whether any data has been stolen.
The cybersecurity event at Hawaiian Airlines occurred around the same time that Canadian carrier WestJet fell victim to a cyberattack. Several days ago, the airline admitted that some personal passenger data was stolen as a result of a hack.
There’s currently no suggestion that the IT issues Alaska Airlines is facing are the result of a cyberattack. The airline industry has been put on high alert to the threat of hackers targeting their systems.
