Alaska Airlines suspended 7% of its flights on Monday because an essential IT hardware failure led to a systemwide ground stop during late Sunday. The data center failure at Alaska Airlines required the airline to stop all operations for three hours before flights started again at 11 p.m. Pacific time.
The airline canceled 64 flights during Monday while repositioning aircraft and crew members after the total cancellation of 150 flights since Sunday evening. The company announced in a statement that more flight disruptions were expected because the outage did not stem from cybersecurity issues or external factors.
The airline resumed its operations yet flight disruptions from the outage period spread throughout its entire network. The airline which operates as one of the five major U.S. carriers by passenger numbers did not specify which systems were impacted but described the failure as an unexpected internal hardware problem.
The Federal Aviation Administration received notification about the outage so they put a ground stop in place to minimize additional problems. The majority of Alaska’s systems returned to operation by Monday afternoon although flight disruptions and cancellations persisted for passengers.
The aviation industry faces increasing concerns about its IT infrastructure because airlines continue to adopt digital operations. Alaska Airlines declared it would investigate the cause of the incident while providing performance updates for its network across all routes.
