Khaberni -The American company Alaska Airlines announced that it had stopped all its flights after a technical issue affected its systems on Sunday, without specifying the nature of the issue. This marks the second time the company has halted its fleet operations in just over a year.
In an email sent to "Reuters" on Sunday evening, the company added, "At around 8 PM Pacific Time on Sunday (03:00 GMT on Monday), Alaska Airlines encountered an information technology malfunction that affects our operations. We requested a temporary system-wide stop for Alaska and Horizon Air flights."
The airline, based in Seattle, continued that the malfunction would have lingering effects on its operations throughout the evening, without providing further details.
The status page of the Federal Aviation Administration showed all destinations affected by the stoppage of the main airline fleets of Alaska, and the suspension of "Horizon Air" operations.
In April 2024, "Alaska Airlines" completely halted its fleet due to an issue in its aircraft weight and balance calculation system, just a few months after an explosion of a door panel of an "Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9" while it was flying.
The Alaska Airlines Group has an operational fleet comprising 238 Boeing 737 aircraft and 87 Embraer 175 aircraft, according to its website.
In June, Hawaiian Airlines, owned by Alaska Airlines Group, announced that some of its information technology systems had malfunctioned due to a breach. Alaska Airlines Group stated it was still assessing the financial impact of this incident.
News of the information technology problems at Alaska Airlines Group comes at a time when companies "Google" and "Palo Alto Networks" warned of the hacking group "Scattered Spider's" interest in the aviation sector.
In June, the Canadian company WestJet was subjected to an unspecified cyber-attack, while the Australian company Qantas suffered a data breach in July, where a cyber-attacker gained access to the personal information of millions of customers.
It is still unclear whether the malfunction that affected the Alaska Airlines systems is related to Microsoft's announcement on Sunday about "active attacks" on its server software used by government agencies and businesses.
