An IT outage at Alaska Airlines grounded flights again for several hours

Shares of Alaska Air Group (ALK) fell on Friday after the airline posted lower-than-expected quarterly earnings and reported an IT outage that led to a system-wide grounding of all flights of the namesake carrier and Horizon Air.

The company said the IT issues began at 6:30pm Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) yesterday, and announced a ground grounding – meaning certain flights were not allowed to take off – at 10pm EDT. He noted that operations were restored by 3:15 a.m. today.

Alaska Air said the outage was due to a malfunction in its main data center, and “affected several of our key systems that enable us to run various operations, necessitating implementing a ground stop to keep our aircraft in position.” The company said the incident was not a cybersecurity event and the safety of its flights was not compromised.

This was the second IT outage in three months grounding the airline. In July, a problem with its data centers led to the cancellation of more than 200 flights.

Alaska Air Group also reported third-quarter results, reporting adjusted earnings per share of $1.05, below expectations. Revenues of $3.77 billion were essentially in line with estimates. The company said costs were higher than expected due in part to expenses stemming from an IT incident that occurred in July.

Alaska Air Group shares fell more than 4% in recent trading. They have lost about 30% of their value since the beginning of the year.