Alaska Airlines grounds planes nationwide, issues flexible travel waiver

A major U.S. airline halted all departures for hours on Thursday evening amid a tech outage.

Shortly after 7:20 p.m. EDT, Alaska Airlines announced a nationwide ground stop, citing an IT issue that had affected its operations.

The tech outage affected both Alaska’s mainline operation and its flights operated by regional subsidiary Horizon Air.

Alaska’s outage did not affect Hawaiian Airlines, a spokesperson confirmed to TPG. Hawaiian is run by the same parent company as Alaska, but operates as a separate brand.

Thursday’s disruption threatened to cause significant flight delays across the airline’s network, which includes several major hubs on the West Coast — from Seattle to Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego.

“We apologize for the inconvenience. If you’re scheduled to fly tonight, please check your flight status before heading to the airport,” the Seattle-based carrier said in a statement posted to its official social media account.

Checking the airline’s mobile app late Thursday, a message at the top showed the ongoing technology problems affecting the carrier’s systems.

While it wasn’t immediately clear how many flights were initially affected by the ground stop, a multi-hour disruption could cause cascading travel troubles late into Thursday night — and perhaps residual problems on Friday.

Late Thursday, Alaska issued a travel waiver to allow passengers additional flexibility to change or cancel their flight. The advisory covered flights with an original travel date of Thursday or Friday, and allowed rebooking to any day between Thursday and Monday.

Passengers who encounter flight cancellations and major delays are entitled to a refund under U.S. Department of Transportation policies — if they ultimately choose not to fly with the airline instead of accepting rebooking.

Read more: Flight canceled or delayed? Here’s what to do next

However, Alaska has also made a range of guarantees for passenger accommodations when there’s a major flight disruption within the airline’s control — generally, a tech outage falls under that category. Those details can be found on the DOT’s FlightRights.gov dashboard.

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