After a long, chaotic night for travelers, dozens of flights remained canceled and delayed in Seattle Friday morning following a massive IT outage at Alaska Airlines.
Operations were restored just before midnight. The airline said in a statement Friday that 229 flights were canceled due to the outage, but operations have resumed.
The airline grounded flights nationwide for hours on Thursday, leaving travelers stranded at airports, including Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
The outage was reported at 4:21 p.m. However, the airline later explained in a statement that the issue first arose around 3:30 p.m., leading to a failure at their primary data center.
Alaska issued an apology for the inconvenience caused to passengers, and travelers scheduled to fly were told to check their flight status before heading to the airport.
At 7 p.m. pacific time, Alaska Airlines posted the following statement on its website with more information:
Alaska Airlines is experiencing an IT outage that has resulted in a systemwide ground stop of Alaska and Horizon Air flights across our network, causing delays and cancellations. The IT outage does not affect Hawaiian Airlines flights. The issue began around 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, October 24, with a failure at our primary data center.
The IT outage has impacted several of our key systems that enable us to run various operations, necessitating the implementation of the ground stop to keep our aircraft in position. The safety of our flights was never compromised.
The IT outage is not a cybersecurity event, and it’s not related to any other events.
We deeply apologize to our guests whose travel plans have been disrupted today. We’re working to get them to their destinations as quickly as we can. For those who have a flight with us, please check your flight status before leaving for the airport. Also, a flexible travel policy is in place to support our guests.
Multiple people were either on planes that were halted before departure or were caught in the chaos while arriving at the Alaska Airlines gates. Wilder McCullough was aboard her 3:50 p.m. flight to California for about an hour, after issues were scanning the passengers’ tickets. Then the IT outage stopped them in their tracks.
“They were like, okay, we’re going to be taking off, it’s an hour fifty-eight to Burbank, and then we didn’t move,” she explained.
After finally getting off the plane, she waited outside at their gate before giving up and cancelling her flight for a work trip, to try again in a few days.
“That is scary, to have an IT shutdown when people are trying to get into the air,” she said.
Others like Mark Welpman, a Gig Harbor man who was looking to go to a submarine reunion in Washington D.C with his wife, toughed it out.
“You have to be patient, you know, it’s not in anyone’s control, so you can’t get mad at anybody. You know, it’s frustrating, for sure,” he said.
Welpman’s flight was scheduled for 4:20 p.m., one minute before Alaska Airlines made its initial announcement. He waited over three hours, but at 7:48 p.m., Welpman said his flight had been canceled because the crew for his flight had already worked the maximum number of hours for the day.
He said he and other passengers were walking onto the plane when the announcement was made. While planes like McCullough’s and Welpman’s sat idle in the Alaska gates, those who were landing, like Sherry Diantonio from a conference in San Diego, were caught in a major backlog on the tarmac.
“So we were trapped on the runway, probably with 15 to 30 planes in front of us, and probably that many behind us,” she explained.
The Seattle resident said they waited for about an hour on the plane before buses came to shuttle the passengers to any available Alaska gates to let them into the terminal.
“And once we got to the D23 gate outside, we were stuck on the bus because there was no one from Alaska to let us inside,” she added.
Diantonio said that while they waited on the bus, the doors were open and many passengers were left inhaling fumes from the bus and other exhaust from outside. She says many people were complaining and getting headaches. A SEA spokesperson said the airport provides the buses in situations like these; however, the airlines pool funding to hire workers to operate those buses, and not the airport.
In response to the claims about fumes from the bus, they explained that the buses are not diesel, and other vehicles in the airport are typically electric. Once Diantonio was eventually inside the airport near the gates, she was met by pure chaos.
“People were everywhere, sitting in the hallway on the floor, they were calling people, they were freaking out, really. Just packed with people in there,” she explained.
She said she met a woman who was frantically asking about any news on the flights being grounded.
“I said, ‘I don’t think you’re going to leave tonight,’ and she started crying, she was like, ‘I’m trying to get to my dying parent in Australia,'” said Diantonio.
The 229 flight cancellations represent significant disruption for Alaska Airlines’ Seattle hub operations, where the carrier dominates with majority market share and hundreds of daily departures that create cascading delays when systemwide ground stops occur.
The primary data center failure at 3:30 p.m. raises questions about Alaska’s redundancy and disaster recovery systems, as modern cloud-based architectures typically include failover capabilities that prevent single points of failure from grounding entire fleets.
The eight-and-a-half-hour duration from initial failure to midnight restoration suggests complex technical challenges beyond simple system reboots, potentially involving database corruption, network infrastructure problems, or difficulties switching to backup systems.
Alaska’s clarification that the outage was “not a cybersecurity event” addresses immediate passenger concerns about hacking or ransomware while leaving open questions about whether the failure resulted from hardware malfunction, software bugs, or human error during maintenance.
The crew duty time limitations that forced cancellations like Welpman’s 7:48 p.m. flight illustrate how FAA regulations protecting pilot and crew rest requirements create operational constraints that prevent airlines from simply delaying flights indefinitely when IT systems fail.
The tarmac backlog with 15 to 30 planes ahead of Diantonio’s aircraft demonstrates how Sea-Tac’s limited gate capacity becomes critical bottleneck during irregular operations, with arriving flights unable to deplane when IT systems prevent gate assignments and passenger processing.
The bus exhaust and fume complaints highlight passenger welfare concerns during extended delays on tarmac buses, though SEA’s explanation that buses use non-diesel fuel and electric ground vehicles suggests the complaints may have stemmed from APU exhaust from nearby aircraft.
The woman trying to reach her dying parent in Australia represents the human cost of airline IT failures, where passengers with urgent personal situations face impossible choices about whether to wait for restoration or abandon travel plans during family emergencies.
The flexible travel policy Alaska mentioned provides rebooking options and potentially waived change fees, though such policies offer little consolation to passengers like McCullough who missed work commitments or Welpman whose submarine reunion timing cannot be adjusted.
Seattle’s economic dependence on Alaska Airlines as the dominant carrier at Sea-Tac means IT outages disproportionately affect the region compared to cities with more carrier diversity, where passengers can more easily switch to competitor flights when one airline experiences technical problems.
