SPOKANE, Wash. — Nearly 50,000 travelers faced flight delays and cancellations after Alaska Airlines experienced a major computer system outage that disrupted operations across the country.
The IT system failure prompted Alaska Airlines to cancel more than 400 flights before the issue was resolved late Thursday night. Despite the fix, some flights remained delayed or canceled Friday, leaving passengers scrambling to find alternative travel arrangements.
“The people, they tried really hard, there was one agent at the gate and he was trying his best to help people out, but their computer issues were hindering that too,” Allyn Haynes said.
Alaska Airlines had an outage a few months ago, and the airline says there is still work to be done to fix the system.
The disruption impacted travelers like Haynes and his wife, who were trying to get back to their home in Fairbanks, Alaska, from Kansas City.
“The latest that they can tell us is that we should be home on Saturday around 2 a.m. if the connections from Spokane to Seattle and Seattle to Fairbanks work out,” Haynes said.
Haynes says the Alaska agents have been helpful in arranging new flights to get them home, but he’s still frustrated it’s taking so long.
“My wife tried to contact them and left a message. They said they would return the call within 51 minutes and that was five hours ago. We still haven’t got that call back,” Haynes said.
Communication failures compounded the travel disruptions for many passengers. Roberta Angell drove an hour and a half to get to the airport in Spokane and didn’t get any kind of notification from Alaska that her flight had been canceled.
“I showed up here at about 10:20 this morning to get my luggage tag, couldn’t, so I had to go up to the assistants and they had just canceled my flight,” Angell said.
Angell hopes Alaska will find a way to alert people about flight cancellations or delays if something like this ever happens again.
“You hope you can get on another flight, but when they’ve been backed up for two days, they’re all booked. So you’re just stuck,” Angell said.
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