Alaska Airlines IT outage canceled hundreds of flights, company says

More than 360 Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air flights have been canceled Thursday and Friday, the company said, after an information technology outage grounded its planes for roughly eight hours Thursday.
More disruptions are expected Friday, the airline said.
“We sincerely apologize to our guests whose travel plans have been disrupted. We’re working to get them to their destinations as quickly as we can,” Alaska said in a statement, adding that it has a flexible travel policy in place as it works to “return to normal.” Travelers can check their flight status at alaskaair.com/flightstatus.
The issue began around 3:30 p.m. Thursday when a “failure occurred at our primary data center,” Alaska Airlines said in a statement. Flights were grounded until 11:30 p.m. Thursday.
The flight cancellations impacted Alaska Airlines and its subsidiary regional airline Horizon Air. The IT outage did not affect Hawaiian Airlines, which Alaska acquired last year and is in the process of merging into its system.
The outage was not a cybersecurity incident, the airline said. It did not share any additional details about what went wrong.
At Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Alaska’s home base, the airline canceled 115 flights Thursday, according to data from flight-tracking website FlightAware. It had canceled 88 more flights as of Friday morning around 8:30 a.m.
Horizon canceled 29 flights from Sea-Tac on Thursday and another 11 as of Friday morning.
The company postponed an earnings call scheduled for Friday morning. It did not yet have an estimate of the financial impact of the ground stop.
An IT outage earlier this year that grounded the fleet for roughly three hours lowered Alaska’s earnings per share by about 10 cents, the airline said in July shortly after the incident.
That outage occurred after a hardware failure at a data center.
In a preview of its earnings released before the planned call with analysts, an Alaska executive said the July IT outage and tumultuous summer weather made for a “challenging” third quarter.
Alaska reported net income of $73 million, or 62 cents per share, in the three months from July through September, a drop from net income of $236 million, or $1.84 per share, in the same time period last year.