- Alaska Airlines suspends flights due to major IT outage affecting more than 50,000 passengers
- Company denies cyber attack; cites data center failures and ongoing system recovery
- A similar outage occurred in July 2025; External experts now review the resilience of the infrastructure.
Alaska Airlines was forced to cancel hundreds of flights after experiencing an “IT failure that resulted in a system-wide grounding of Alaska and Horizon Air flights.”
Alaska Airlines confirmed the news in a status update posted over the weekend, saying there was a “failure” in its main data center. He denied that it was a cyber attack or a similar external incident:
“IT outage is not a cybersecurity incident,” he said. “The IT outage is not a cybersecurity event and is not related to any other event.”
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This event, which is unrelated to any other event, affected several of Alaska Airlines’ key systems that allow it to execute various operations, according to the announcement. As a result, the company was forced to ground hundreds of planes.
“The safety of our flights was never compromised,” he concluded.
Many other flights were delayed and more than 50,000 passengers were affected by the incident.
Operations were apparently restored early Friday morning, but the company continued working throughout the weekend to further “normalize” them.
This is the second major disruption affecting Alaska Airlines, following an issue in July 2025 that also forced the company to suspend flights.
“After a similar outage earlier this year, we took steps to harden our systems, but this outage underscores the work that remains to be done to ensure system stability,” the company said in the announcement.
“We are immediately bringing in external technical experts to diagnose our entire IT infrastructure and ensure we are as resilient as we need to be.”
The company did not provide any explanation for the root cause, leading media and researchers to speculate that it was the work of the Scattered Spider ransomware group; however, the airline says that was not the case.
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