Alaska Airlines was forced to bring its operations to a grinding halt after a massive technology failure involving its data center shut down key systems across its network on October 23. The outage began at around 3:30 p.m. Pacific Time and triggered a systemwide ground stop for Alaska and Horizon Air flights that lasted nearly eight hours, stranding more than 49,000 travelers at airports across North America.
The airline was able to figure out that the reason for the incident was a hardware failure at Alaska’s primary data center, which is a core part of the airline’s IT infrastructure, and said that the outage wasn"t a cybersecurity incident. The failure affected several critical systems that coordinate Alaska’s flight scheduling, aircraft routing, and crew assignments, due to which the airline had to ground its planes nationwide, as it said that system reliability was a core obligation of its operations and that passenger safety was never compromised.
Frustrated passengers quickly took to social media to describe long lines, system shutdowns, and confusion at airports such as Seattle-Tacoma International and Los Angeles International. The airlines also postponed their quarterly earnings call scheduled for Friday morning as the disruption was quite significant.
In a statement, Alaska Airlines apologized for the incident and called it an “unacceptable” performance:
We know our guests put their trust in us when they choose to fly with Alaska, and this level of performance is not acceptable. And while safety is our most critical responsibility, the reliability of our operations is an essential expectation of our guests.
As catastrophic as it sounds, this isn"t Alaska Airlines" first incident. In July earlier this year, the company experienced another data center malfunction that grounded flights for three hours and took days to unravel. Both of these failures appear to originate from the same or similar infrastructure points. The airline has since announced that it is bringing external technology experts to conduct a full-scale review of its network architecture and "harden" its systems.
As of Friday evening, the airline reported that operations were “normalizing” and most systems had been restored, though residual cancellations and delays were expected through the weekend.
Update at 00:05 EST – Modified the wording in the second paragraph to reflect the accurate reason for the incident.