Alaska Airlines resumes flights after equipment failure at a data center grounds all its planes

Alaska Airlines has resumed flights after the failure of a critical piece of hardware forced the airline to ground all its planes for approximately three hours but the effects will linger into Monday the company disclosed The carrier issued a system-wide ground stop for Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air flights around p m Pacific time Sunday The stop was lifted at p m the Seattle-based company revealed in a social media post More than flights have been canceled since Sunday evening The FlightAware tracking site revealed cancellations and nearly delays Monday We appreciate the patience of our guests whose passage plans have been disrupted We re working to get them to their destinations as briskly as we can the airline mentioned in a report A closer look at the cause The airline explained a critical piece of multi-redundant hardware at our facts centers manufactured by a third-party experienced an unexpected failure That affected several of the airlines key systems but hacking was not involved and the airline reported the development was not related to any other events like the attack involving Microsoft s servers over the weekend or the new cybersecurity event at its Hawaiian Airlines subsidiary in June The airline also declared it is working with its vendor to replace the hardware at the input center Alaska Airlines led all airlines in cancellations Monday according to FlightAware Multiple of the cancellations were at the airline s major hub of Seattle but it also canceled flights at airports all over the country The Federal Aviation Administration website had ratified a ground stop for all Alaska Airlines mainline and Horizon aircraft referring to an Alaska Airlines subsidiary But the FAA referred all questions to the airline Monday History of outages There has been a history of computer problems disrupting flights in the industry though the majority of the time the disruptions are only temporary Airlines have large layered machinery systems and crew-tracking programs are often among the oldest systems They also rely on other systems to check in passengers and make pre-flight calculations about aircraft weight and balance But a few of the the majority widespread problems are often related to computer systems the airlines themselves don t control Nearly every major U S airline had to cancel hundreds if not thousands of flights last year after a major internet outage that was blamed on a program update that cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike sent to Microsoft computers of its corporate customers including numerous airlines The FAA caused all U S departures to be halted briefly in January when a system used to alert pilots to safety hazards failed That was the first nationwide ground stop since the Sept terrorist attacks The agency blamed a contractor that it revealed accidentally deleted files while synchronizing the alert system and its backup One of the biggest individual airline tech problems was the December debacle that caused Southwest Airlines to cancel nearly flights over a -day stretch After a federal probe of Southwest s compliance with consumer-protection rules the airline agreed to pay a million fine as part of a million settlement with the Transportation Department Southwest s breakdown started during a winter storm but the airline s recovery took unusually long because of problems with a crew-scheduling system The air traffic controllers that direct flights in and out of the nation s airports also rely on outdated hardware that the Trump administration has proposed overhauling after a series of high-profile failures and crashes this year especially at Newark Liberty International Airport Congress included billion for those upgrades in Trump s overall budget bill but authorities have described that as only a down payment on the project Alaska Airlines in focus The National Transportation Board last month credited the crew of Alaska Airlines flight with the survival of passengers when a door plug panel flew off the plane shortly after takeoff on Jan leaving a hole that sucked objects out of the cabin In September Alaska Airlines revealed it grounded its flights in Seattle briefly due to notable disruptions from an unspecified device challenge that was resolved within hours Source