Alaska Airlines has been experiencing a major IT outage that began yesterday, Thursday, October 23 around 3:30 p.m. Pacific Time, when a failure at its primary data center disrupted several key operational systems. The issue forced the airline to implement a systemwide ground stop for both Alaska and Horizon Air flights to maintain safety and proper aircraft positioning. Although the incident was confirmed not to be a cybersecurity event, it caused extensive delays and cancellations across the network. The issue ran into today, Friday, October 24 with the ground stop having finally been lifted at 11:30 p.m. the night before. The airline reported over 229 flight cancellations and warned that additional disruptions were likely as it worked to reposition aircraft and crews.

Alaska Airlines apologized to passengers, implemented a flexible travel policy, and encouraged travelers to check flight statuses before heading to the airport as it worked to resume normal operations. The outage highlighted the airline’s dependence on complex IT systems to manage flight operations, scheduling, and communication across its network.

Incidents like this underscore the critical need for a unified, end-to-end monitoring and analysis platform like NIKSUN’s integrated NPM + APM + Forensics + Availability + More solution. By combining deep packet inspection, flow collection, telemetry ingestion, log analysis, synthetic transaction monitoring, and SNMP polling into a single cohesive system, NIKSUN enables organizations to detect anomalies across L2-L7 proactively, investigate issues in real time to determine the who, what, where, when, and how, and rapidly remediate root causes before they escalate. Such unified visibility and forensic capability are essential for preventing large-scale IT disruptions that can halt operations, damage customer trust, and lead to significant financial and reputational losses. Read more about this story on our LinkedIn page