Alaska Airlines Resumes Flights After IT Outage—Here’s What to Do If Your Travel Is Disrupted
No traveler wants to be caught in the middle of an airline technical outage. These widespread IT meltdowns can leave passengers stranded on planes or hunkered down in terminals for hours as hundreds of flights are canceled and airline operations come to a screeching halt.
Unfortunately, it appears that airlines are experiencing IT system outages on a more frequent basis. “As airline operations and pricing get increasingly complex, airline IT failures happen with increasing frequency and to a greater technical extent,” says Travelers United, a consumer advocacy group. “The complex airline systems [are] cobbled together from bits and pieces of different airlines as mergers over recent years have reduced airline competition.”
Multiple airlines, including American, Delta, Southwest, United, and British Airways, have faced IT system failures in recent years. The most severe of the bunch was caused by a CrowdStrike issue in 2024, leading to thousands of canceled flights around the world. While that one impacted multiple major airlines in the US, others are isolated to specific carriers: Alaska Airlines experienced “a significant IT outage” on July 20, 2025 that resulted in a system-wide ground stop of flights for both Alaska and its regional subsidiary Horizon Air. “A critical piece of multi-redundant hardware at our data centers, manufactured by a third-party, experienced an unexpected failure,” the airline said in a statement. “When that happened, it 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.”
Although flight safety was never compromised, Alaska’s outage led to more than 150 flight cancellations. “Additional flight disruptions are likely as we reposition aircraft and crews throughout our network,” the airline said on Monday, July 21. The airline is offering a flexible travel policy for fliers who want to change or cancel their flights scheduled through July 23.
Often, these type of technical failures affect systems like the crew management software, which is a key component of flight operations. Systems like this have “so many dimensions to factor, including the passage of time, individual flight crew members with rules governing their work hours, routes, aircraft, and location of all of these people and planes at that moment in time,” explains Mike Arnot, an airline expert and founder of the aviation communications firm Juliett Alpha. “However, sometimes it’s so bad, with planes and people so out of position, a huge number of flights need to be canceled to reset. They just have to take drastic action to reset the entire operation and get planes and people in position to start again.”
As a result, it can take multiple days for an airline to recover from an IT outage along these lines. Here’s what to know if you get caught in the middle of one—and how to receive compensation for significant delays and cancellations.
How to get help from customer service fast
It’s no surprise that in an airline IT meltdown, representatives quickly become overwhelmed. “When you need help during a major airline event, the biggest challenge is reaching someone,” says Gary Leff, a travel advisor and author of aviation blog View From the Wing. “Phone lines are overloaded. Often the website and mobile app will crash as too many customers seek help.”
