Alaska Airlines Grounded Its Entire Fleet. Here’s Why.

An Airbus 320 airplane of Alaska airlines seen at Los Cabos International Airport at San Jose del Cabo, Los Cabos Municipality, Baja California Sur state, Mexico. (Daniel Slim/AFP/Getty Images)

Alaska Air temporarily grounded large parts of its its fleet late Sunday following an IT outage, the carrier said.

“A critical piece of multi-redundant hardware at our data centers, manufactured by a third-party, experienced an unexpected failure,” Alaska Air lines told Barron’s in a written statement. “It impacted several of our key systems that enable us to run various operations, necessitating the implementation of a ground stop to keep aircraft in position. The safety of our flights was never compromised.”

The outage affected both Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air, both subsidiaries of Alaska Air Group.

Since Sunday evening, the carrier has had more than 150 flight cancelations. “Additional flight disruptions are likely as we reposition aircraft and crews throughout our network,” Alaska Airlines said.

Around 11 p.m. Eastern Time, Alaska said an IT outage was impacting its operations. “We requested a temporary, system-wide ground stop until the issue is resolved,” the carrier said in a post on the social media site X. At about 2.30 am ET, the airline said that it had resolved its “earlier IT outage” and resumed operations.

By late morning Monday, Alaska Airlines had canceled 136 flights over Sunday and Monday, while 431 flights were delayed, according to data from flight tracker FlightAware.com. Horizon Air had cancelled 55 flight while 96 were delayed, as of 10.50 a.m. Eastern time.

Alaska Air stock fell 0.6% to $52.81 Monday while the S&P 500 was up 0.6%.

While Alaska’s outage looks like it won’t prove to be too damaging to the stock this time, it’s a reminder of the threat posed to the sector by tech outages.

Delta Air Lines is still seeking compensation from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike for the $500 million it said it lost last year following a major IT outage. CrowdStrike rejected Delta’s claims that it acted inappropriately and said it strongly rejects “any allegations that it was grossly negligent,” in a statement last year.

Southwest Airlines also felt the pain of software problems over the holiday season in 2022. The discount airline was fined $140 million by the Department of Transportation after close to 17,000 flights were canceled. The DOT also ensured Southwest paid more than $600 million in refunds and reimbursements to passengers.

“The IT outage is not related to any other current events, and it’s not connected to the recent cybersecurity incident at Hawaiian Airlines,” said Alaska, which reports earnings after the markets close Wednesday.

Write to Elsa Ohlen at elsa.ohlen@barrons.com