As it works to recover from a system-wide ground stop that halted flight activity for about 3h over the weekend, Alaska Airlines insists that the operational shutdown was not related to a cybersecurity breach.
Alaska and regional subsidiary Horizon Air experienced a ”significant IT outage” that prompted Alaska to request on 20 July ground stop from the Federal Aviation Administration.
The ground stop lasted from about 20:00 local time in Seattle to 23:00 that evening.
The event created a cascading series of disruptions throughout Alaska’s network that have continued into 21 July. At 12:00 that day, about 10% of Alaska’s flights were cancelled and 25% were delayed, according to flight-tracking platform FlightAware.
Alaska says that about 200 total flights have been cancelled as a result of the IT outage, impacting some 13,500 air travellers.
Further flight cancellations are possible as Alaska repositions aircraft and crews. The airline says it is working to re-accommodate passengers whose itineraries have been disrupted.
”A critical piece of multi-redundant hardware at our data centres, manufactured by a third-party, experienced an unexpected failure,” the airline says. ”When that happened, it impacted several of our key systems that enable us to run various operations, necessitating the implementation of a ground stop to keep aircraft in position.
“The safety of our flights was never compromised,” the company adds.
Alaska emphasises that the IT malfunction was an isolated occurrence, unrelated to hacking or “any other current events” – perhaps referring to recent cybersecurity breaches at airlines such as WestJet and Alaska Air Group member Hawaiian Airlines.
”We are currently working with our vendor to replace the hardware equipment at the data centre,” Alaska says.
Canadian carrier WestJet recently disclosed that it is still investigating a “sophisticated, criminal third-party” that breached its databases last month.
”Unfortunately, we can now confirm that certain data was illegally obtained from WestJet’s systems,” it says. “Thanks to our internal precautionary measures, no credit card or debit card numbers and no guest user passwords were obtained.”
Technology failures have led to high-profile operational meltdowns in recent, including Southwest Airlines’ disastrous 2022-23 winter holiday performance and Delta Air Lines’ IT outage last summer, for which Delta is suing cybersecurity company CrowdStrike.
Those incidents impacted the travel schedules of millions of passengers and cost both airlines hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue.
