Alaska Airlines resumes operations after IT outage grounded flights

A major IT outage has affected Alaska Airlines
Its full fleet was grounded, and 11 flights were in the sky at the time
It’s not the company’s first IT-related fleet grounding

Alaska Airlines flights are back up and running after a mysterious IT outage grounded flights for several hours.

The outage resulted in all of the company’s flights being grounded as well as affecting Horizon Air flights – a subsidiary of the Alaskan company.

Besides the flight disruptions, residual delays are expected as the airline repositions aircraft and crews to resume at normal capacity.

Alaska Airlines IT outage

“It will take some time to get our overall operations back to normal,” the company explained in an X post.

It’s believed that around 11 flights were in the air during the outage, which was resolved several hours after first being detected.

No official explanation of the root cause has been provided, but some signs point toward the Scattered Spider ransomware group, which has recently targeted other victims in the aviation sector including Qantas, Air Serbia and WestJet.

Hawaiian Airlines, which has also been under Alaskan ownership since late 2024, also experienced a cyber incident earlier this year.

In June 2025, Hawaiian Airlines shared in an X post: “Hawaiian Airlines is addressing a cybersecurity event that has affected some of our IT systems.”

For Alaska Airlines specifically, this marks the second IT-related fleet grounding in a little over a year. In April 2024, an issue with the system that calculates aircraft weight and balance also caused a full grounding.

Interestingly, Microsoft also declared it was experiencing “active attacks” on server software on July 20 (via Reuters), but few details have been shared regarding that incident either. It’s unclear whether the two incidents are related.

TechRadar Pro has asked Alaska Airlines for more information on yesterday’s incident, but we did not receive an immediate response.