Prime Highlights
- Alaska Airlines cancelled all mainline and Horizon Air flights for three hours following a catastrophic IT system meltdown.
- Service was restored after three hours, although passengers were still vulnerable to cancellation and delay.
Key Facts
- The outage was caused by a hardware component and not an attack on the company’s systems.
- Over 150 flights were cancelled, and more than 7% of scheduled flights were delayed.
Key Background
Evening of July 21 saw Alaska Airlines request a full ground stop of its entire fleet, as well as those of its subsidiary Horizon Air. The move came after a sheer breakdown of its IT systems, rendering key flight operations inoperative for a while. The historic shutdown affected airport systems nationwide, which caused long lines, cancelled check-ins, and grounded passengers across the board.
The root cause was eventually found to have been due to a primary failure in a multi-redundant hardware component at one of the airlines’ data centers. The incident was subsequently reported by Alaska Airlines to not have been due to a cybersecurity attack, and this relieved concerns about information leakage. The outage did result in critical tools required for flight operations, crew operations, and aircraft routing—and the airline grounded planes until systems returned to normal.
Alaska Airlines had resumed the ground stop and was flying by approximately 11:00 p.m. Pacific Time. But the outage’s ripple effect carried over to the following day, as more than 150 flight cancellations and delays at major hubs. Travelers were delayed for hours, missed flights, and logistics chaos, to which the airline responded with an apology and introducing a flexible travel policy. These included free rebooking, stays in hotels, and extended validity on revised travel by July 28.
This is the second significant disruption of this sort for Alaska Airlines in over a year, affirming the susceptibility of airline computer systems. The industry as a whole has had a string of such incidents over recent years, with worry expressed about outdated technology and inadequate redundancy. Alaska Airlines asserted that passenger safety was never at risk and vowed to examine its systems so as not to repeat these failures in the future.
