CHICAGO — Alaska Airlines warned of more flight disruptions on Monday after an unexpected failure of a critical piece of hardware at its data centers late Sunday forced it to halt all flights for about three hours.
The Seattle-based airline had canceled 66 or 7% of its scheduled flights on Monday, while 110, or 12%, of its scheduled flights were delayed as of 8:45 a.m. MT, according to data from FlightAware. Its subsidiary Horizon Air was also dealing with flight disruptions.
Since Sunday evening, the airline has had more than 150 flight cancellations as the outage prompted it to request a system-wide ground stop for Alaska and Horizon Air flights at around 8 p.m. PT on Sunday. Its operations resumed around 11 p.m. PT.
“Additional flight disruptions are likely as we reposition aircraft and crews throughout our network,” Alaska said in a statement. “The IT outage is not related to any other current events, and it’s not a cybersecurity event.”
The company said a critical piece of hardware at its data centers, manufactured by a third-party, experienced an unexpected failure. It impacted several of its key systems, necessitating a ground stop to keep aircraft in position, Alaska added.
“We are currently working with our vendor to replace the hardware equipment at the data center,” it said, without specifying the location.
