US carrier Alaska Airlines said early on Friday that it had restored its systems and resumed operations after a large-scale IT failure grounded all its flights across the United States.
The outage, which began on Thursday evening, triggered a nationwide ground stop that lasted several hours and led to at least 229 flight cancellations.
The airline confirmed that the ground stop — which also affected its regional subsidiary Horizon Air — was lifted around 23:30 local time (08:30 SAST on Friday), allowing flights to resume gradually.
“We are working to get our operations back on track as quickly and safely as possible,” Alaska Airlines said in a statement, while cautioning that further delays and cancellations were likely as planes and crews were repositioned across its network .
According to a report by Forbes, the outage was caused by a failure at the airline’s primary data centre, disrupting critical systems that manage flight schedules, crew coordination, and passenger bookings.
The shutdown lasted more than seven hours, forcing Alaska Airlines to temporarily halt departures from major airports including Seattle-Tacoma International — its largest hub — where nearly 40 outbound flights were cancelled overnight.
Passengers took to social media to voice frustration over long delays, cancelled connections, and limited communication.
Alaska Airlines acknowledged the technical fault on X (formerly Twitter), writing, “Unfortunately, we are experiencing an error on our system, but our IT team is working to get this resolved as soon as possible.”
The airline postponed its third-quarter financial results call, originally scheduled for Friday, so that teams could focus on “supporting guests and restoring operations.” The company’s shares dropped about 1.3% in premarket trading on Friday following the outage.
This is the second major IT disruption to hit Alaska Airlines this year. In July, the airline grounded all flights for nearly three hours due to another system failure.
“A single failure can have a domino effect across the network,” said aviation analyst Robert Mann.
“What’s key is how quickly an airline can recover and communicate with passengers.”
As of Friday morning (10:00 SAST), most Alaska Airlines flights were back in operation, though delays continued in major cities including Seattle, Los Angeles, and Portland.
The airline said it would continue to update passengers through its app and website as systems fully stabilise.
