Sawt Falasteen - Alaska Airlines resumes service after IT outage grounds planes

"We're working to get our operations back on track today," Alaska Airlines said in a statement to AFP.

"Since Sunday evening, we've had more than 150 flight cancellations, including 64 cancellations today," said the carrier, the fifth largest US airline. "Additional flight disruptions are likely as we reposition aircraft and crews."

The outage started at around 0300 GMT and ended at around 0600 GMT, according to Alaska Airlines messages on social media.

The airline apologized for the disruption, saying it "will take some time to get our overall operations back to normal."

Alaska Airlines attributed the problem to the failure of "a critical piece of multi-redundant hardware at our data centers."

"The safety of our flights was never compromised," it added.

The airline's outage comes a day after Microsoft warned of "active attacks" targeting server software used by businesses to share internal documents and urged security updates.

But Alaska Airlines said the outage was "not related to any other current events, and it's not a cybersecurity event," adding that it was working to replace hardware equipment.

The grounding drew a backlash from frustrated passengers.

"This is brutal. We've been sitting at the airport for two hours," wrote an X user named Caleb Heimlich.

"It's 10:20 pm, people are tired, hungry, etc. This is not okay," said another.

Alaska last year also experienced an IT outage that caused disruption and delayed flights.

The incident also comes more than a year after a door plug section of a new Boeing 737 Max 9 blew out during an Alaska Airlines flight between Portland, Oregon and Ontario, California.

The 171 passengers and six crew members survived the rapid decompression, but the FAA temporarily grounded many Boeing 737-9 aircraft operated by US airlines. 

W.Mansour--SF-PST