Alaska Airlines grounds all flights after IT outage disrupts systems

US carrier Alaska Airlines grounded its flights after an IT outage that affected its systems, the company said.

The unspecified outage marks the second time Alaska Airlines has grounded its fleet in just over a year.

“At approximately 8pm Pacific on Sunday (13:00 AEST on Monday), Alaska Airlines experienced an IT outage that’s impacting our operations,” the company said.

“We requested a temporary, system-wide ground stop for Alaska and Horizon Air flights.”

The Seattle-based airline stated that there would be residual impacts to its operations throughout the evening, without providing further details.

The FAA did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment outside regular business hours.

The FAA status page showed all destinations affected by the ground stop of Alaska’s mainline aircraft, and the suspension of Horizon’s operations.

In April 2024, Alaska grounded its entire fleet due to an issue with the system that calculates the weight and balance of its planes, just a few months after a door panel on an Alaska Airlines-operated Boeing 737 MAX 9 jet blew off midair.

Alaska Air Group maintains an operational fleet of 238 Boeing 737 aircraft and 87 Embraer 175 aircraft, according to its website.

In June, Alaska Air Group-owned Hawaiian Airlines said some of its IT systems were disrupted by a hack. Alaska Air Group said it was still determining the financial impact of that event.

The news of Alaska’s IT issues comes at a time when tech companies Google and Palo Alto Networks have warned of the “Scattered Spider” hacking group’s interest in the aviation sector.

Canada’s WestJet Airlines was struck by an unspecified cyber incident in June, while Australia’s Qantas experienced a data breach in July where a cyber hacker accessed the personal information of millions of customers.

It remains unclear whether Alaska’s outage is related to Microsoft’s announcement that there were “active attacks” on its server software used by government agencies and businesses.

Alaska did not immediately respond to a request seeking comment on whether the outage was related to the Microsoft announcement.