It clearly wasn't as bad as Delta Airlines' meltdown last summer, or the Southwest Airlines meltdown in December 2022, but Alaska Airlines had an IT "outage" Sunday evening that led to a three-hour ground stop for all its planes.

The trouble began at 8 pm Sunday, according to a statement from Alaska Airlines posted to Xitter Sunday night. Without explaining the nature of the computer trouble, the company said it "experienced an IT outage that resulted in a temporary, system-wide ground stop for Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air flights."

The ground stop was lifted by 11 pm, but the company warned that, "As we reposition our aircraft and crews, there will most likely be residual impacts to our flights. It will take some time to get our overall operations back to normal."

As a result of the outage, 150 flights have been canceled, including 74 so far on Monday. Additonally, 161 Alaska flights have been delayed, per the Seattle Times.

Alaska Airlines later explained to CBS News that "a critical piece of multi-redundant hardware at our data centers, manufactured by a third-party, experienced an unexpected failure" Sunday night which "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 company clarified that "The safety of our flights was never compromised," and this IT issue was not related to a cyberattack that impacted several carriers in June, including Hawaiian Airlines.

As the Associated Press notes, Alaska Airlines had another temporary ground stop for its flights in Seattle last September, due to unspecified "significant disruptions" in its technology. And the FAA issued a temporary ground stop for all Alaska planes in April 2024 due to a problem that occurred after "an upgrade to the system that calculates our weight and balance."

The airline industry as a whole has had a rocky few years of both high-profile safety incidents — including one in January 2024 in which an Alaska plane lost a door panel mid-flight, though all the passengers remained safe from injury due to the quick work of the flight crew.

The Southwest Airlines meltdown of December 2022 was the worst overall, occurring as it did during a storm and during the holiday season. In that incident, which stretched over ten days, an antiquated system for scheduling flight crews and a large number of sick-calls by flight attendants led to mass cancellations of flights, which in turn led to mass strandings of passengers and tons of lost luggage all over the country. That meltdown was wildly costly for Southwest, costing the airline $600 million in resimbursements to passengers, and a $140 million fine from the Department of Transportation, in addition to revenue losses from 15,000 canceled flights.

Previously: Woman Shouting Threats and Profanities at Flight Attendant Causes Alaska Flight Out of SFO to Be Diverted

Photo by David Syphers