Alaska Airlines outage: Why do airline IT systems keep failing?
October 24, 2025
Alaska Airlines is slowly resuming service after a fresh IT outage forced a systemwide ground stop late Thursday, 23 October. The airline said the disruption began “around 3:30 p.m.” Pacific due to a failure at its primary data centre.
IT outage impacts Alaska and Horizon flights
The outage affected core operational systems, prompting Alaska and Horizon to halt departures. Hawaiian Airlines, owned by Alaska Air Group, was not affected. The carrier emphasised the event was not a cybersecurity incident and published a flexible travel policy while recovery got underway.
“We are working to get our operations back on track as quickly and safely as possible. Since this afternoon, we’ve had more than 229 flight cancellations. Additional flight disruptions are likely as we reposition aircraft and crews throughout our network,” Alaska Airlines stated in its most recent update on the outage.
“We appreciate the patience of our guests whose travel plans have been disrupted. We’re working to get them to their destinations as quickly as we can. Before heading to the airport, we encourage flyers to check their flight status.”
This is the second Alaska-wide IT grounding in a matter of months. In July 2025, Alaska again blamed a critical hardware failure at a data centre that halted operations for roughly three hours, triggering cascading delays and cancellations the following day during recovery.
So, why does this keep happening to Alaska and to airlines in general?
A perfect storm: complex stacks, single points of failure
Airlines run extraordinarily interconnected technology stacks: reservations and inventory (PSS), crew and aircraft scheduling, weight-and-balance, departure control, maintenance, gate management and more. When a dependency deep in that stack—like data-centre hardware or a legacy integration—fails, it can ground an airline even if aircraft and crews are ready.
Industry analyses have long warned of this fragility. A McKinsey paper on airline IT stability calls out the risk from monolithic architectures and legacy operational-technology interfaces, urging decoupling via APIs and cloud-enabled orchestration to reduce carry-over issues when something breaks.
Not just Alaska: IT outages across the industry
US carriers have poured billions into digital tools, but tech debt in foundational systems persists. SITA’s 2024 Air Transport IT Insights shows record airline IT spending across the globe—an estimated $37 billion—yet also underscores ongoing modernisation and resilience gaps that operators are still closing.
Even when airlines migrate workloads to cloud or SaaS providers, dependencies don’t disappear—they shift. If redundancy is imperfect—whether due to cost, complexity, or integration issues—one component failure can still propagate quickly.
Government watchdogs have noted similar fragility across aviation technology. A Government Accountability Office (GAO) review of airline IT outages found 34 incidents over 3 years, 85% of which caused flight delays or cancellations. The GAO noted that there’s no consistent, public reporting taxonomy for airline-caused IT disruptions, making it harder for regulators and consumers to benchmark root causes and improvements.
The GAO inquiry into IT outages found that failures impacted service at 11 of the 12 airlines selected for review. IT vulnerability is not an issue for a single airline; it is an industry-wide problem.
This summer, United grounded hundreds of flights when an internal technology platform (Unimatic) failed, snarling major hubs before recovery.
A major internet outage last year, attributed to a software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike sent to Microsoft computers, affected corporate customers worldwide, including many airlines and airports. Delta Air Lines took more than five days to recover from the incident, with flight disruptions impacting tens of thousands of passengers.
Airlines need to strengthen their technology backbone
Different failure modes—hardware, software, or integration—can lead to grounded aeroplanes and rolling delays. Even after “fixing” the IT fault, airlines must rebuild the operation: aircraft and crews are out of position, duty-time limits kick in, and hubs need to clear aircraft backlogs.
Many airlines’ operational cores still have single points of failure that modernisation efforts haven’t eliminated. That’s hardly unique in aviation, but it is fixable. As McKinsey recommended, “Digitisation requires a powerful, reliable backbone that has security and resilience built in.”
Until airlines ensure the backbone is in place, passengers can expect the IT outage, ground stop, and rolling recovery pattern to keep repeating at Alaska Airlines and beyond.
Featured Image: Alaska Airlines
