Alaska Airlines is rushing to fix a major disruption to its service after a hardware failure forced a ground stop of its planes for around three hours Sunday night.

The airline was still continuing to “get our operations back on track” as of 11 a.m. Monday, according to a statement. The SeaTac, Washington-based carrier first reported the outage around 8 p.m., which persisted until 11 p.m. The related ground stop applied to Alaska and Horizon Air flights, which led to around 200 flight cancellations as of Monday morning.

In its statement, Alaska Airlines pointed to an “unexpected failure” of a crucial piece of multi-redundant hardware at its data centers that led to the outage.

“When that happened, it impacted several of our key systems that enable us to run various operations, necessitating the implementation of a ground stop to keep aircraft in position,” the statement read. “The safety of our flights was never compromised.”

The carrier said the hardware is produced by a third party, and it’s working with the vendor to replace it. Alaska Airlines didn’t immediately respond to a follow-up question asking the purpose of the hardware.

Alaska said that the outage is not tied to other current events or a cybersecurity incident. Cybersecurity bugs have made recent global headlines as hackers target Microsoft, with the tech giant scrambling to patch defects in its SharePoint web application.

Federal Aviation Administration spokesperson Cassandra Nolan directed a request for further details about the outage to Alaska Airlines.

Last year, Alaska Airlines requested multiple ground stops tied to technological issues.

In December, the carrier grounded flights at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport for 40 minutes due to an IT issue, which also impacted its Cyber Monday sale. That followed major disruptions reported in September when Alaska Airlines had to ground its planes because of another technology mishap. And in April, the airline grounded its flights for an hour while it handled an issue that occurred as its system was upgraded.

However, it’s not the only carrier that’s been forced to make that decision in recent years. Southwest Airlines had to ground its planes around the country in April 2023. It blamed “data connection issues resulting from a firewall failure,” according to reporting at the time.

John Nance, a Friday Harbor-based aviation analyst for ABC World News and Good Morning America, said it’s the first time he’s heard any large airline attribute a major disruption, such as Alaska Airlines’ latest ground stop, to a piece of hardware.

“Like, 90% of the time, it’s software,” said Nance, who is also a retired Alaska Airlines captain.

However, he emphasized that safety remains a top priority in the airline industry. In order to maintain that sense of security, “at the first sign of trouble, they’ll put the airline on the ground,” Nance said in a phone interview Monday. “And that is hugely expensive, as you can imagine.”

While it causes a temporary mess for Alaska Airlines, Nance explained that the carrier — not the FAA — made the call to ground its flights out of an abundance of caution, and that’s an example of the system working well.

“The FAA sets minimum standards,” Nance said. “You don’t want to fly — or even taxi — on an airline that considers that to be their standard. That is always the bottom.”

Nance doesn’t believe the public needs to be concerned about this incident, though he encourages it to continue demanding transparency from the government and airlines.

Ultimately, “Alaska is growing,” Nance said, “and there are growing pains that go along with that.”

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