Alaska Air Restoring Operations After Outage. The Stock Falls Sharply.

Alaska and its subsidiary Horizon Air have canceled more than 360 flights as of Friday morning. (Getty Images)

Key Points

• Alaska Air Group is restoring operations after a technology outage at its primary data center caused over 360 flight cancellations.
• The outage led to 312 flight delays on Thursday and 72 on Friday for Alaska and its subsidiary Horizon Air.
• Alaska’s shares fell 5.1% Friday, following mixed third-quarter results and the postponement of its earnings call.

Alaska Air Group is working to restore operations after a technology outage led to hundreds of flight cancellations and disruptions on Thursday and Friday.

A failure at the airline’s primary data center on Thursday caused the outage, the company said in a statement. Early Friday, the company said IT operations had been restored overnight; a more recent update said it is still working to return operations back to normal. A spokesperson referred Barron’s back to the latest statement.

Alaska and its regional subsidiary Horizon Air have now canceled more than 360 flights as of Friday morning. Alaska and Horizon had a combined 312 flight delays on Thursday and another 72 on Friday, according to data from FlightAware.

Shares of the low-cost airline sank 5.1% Friday, while the U.S. Global Jets exchange-traded fund gained 2.4%.

The turmoil began the same day Alaska posted mixed third-quarter financial results. The company’s quarterly print Thursday showed adjusted earnings of $1.05 a share, which fell short of analysts’ consensus estimate of $1.09 a share. Revenue, however, rose 23% from the prior year, slightly above Wall Street’s expectations.

After the outage, Alaska postponed its conference call to discuss the third-quarter results, which had been scheduled for Friday morning. The company doesn’t yet have an estimate of the outage’s financial impact on fourth-quarter results, it said.

Write to Nate Wolf at nate.wolf@barrons.com