Alaska Airlines has grounded its fleet once again due to a mystery IT issue

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Alaska Airlines grounds flights due to major IT outage, affecting 50,000+ passengers
Company denies cyberattack; cites data center failure and ongoing system recovery
Similar outage occurred in July 2025; external experts now reviewing infrastructure resilience

Alaska Airlines was forced to cancel hundreds of flights after it experienced an “IT outage that resulted in a systemwide ground stop of Alaska and Horizon Air flights”.

Alaska Airlines confirmed the news in a status update posted over the weekend, saying that there has been a “failure” at its primary data center. It denied this being a cyberattack or a similar, outside incident:

“The IT outage is not a cybersecurity incident,” it said. “The IT outage is not a cybersecurity event, and it’s not related to any other events.”

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This, not-related-to-any-other-events event, impacted several of Alaska Airlines’ key systems that enable it to run various operations, the announcement further stated. As a result, the company was forced to ground hundreds of aircraft.

“The safety of our flights was never compromised,” it concluded.

Numerous other flights were delayed, and more than 50,000 passengers were affected by the incident.

Operations were apparently restored early morning on Friday, but the company continued working throughout the weekend to “normalize” them further.

This is the second major outage to hit Alaska Airlines, following a July 2025 issue which also forced the company to ground flights.

“Following a similar disruption earlier this year, we took action to harden our systems, but this failure underscores the work that remains to be done to ensure system stability,” the company said in the announcement.

“We are immediately bringing in outside technical experts to diagnose our entire IT infrastructure to ensure we are as resilient as we need to be.”

The company did not provide any explanation of the root cause, which made the media and researchers speculate that it was the work of the Scattered Spider ransomware group - however the airline says this was not the case.

Via The Register

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Sead is a seasoned freelance journalist based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He writes about IT (cloud, IoT, 5G, VPN) and cybersecurity (ransomware, data breaches, laws and regulations). In his career, spanning more than a decade, he’s written for numerous media outlets, including Al Jazeera Balkans. He’s also held several modules on content writing for Represent Communications.

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