Peninsula Daily News News Sources
SEATTLE — Computer service that cut off Alaska Airlines’ ability to put passengers on planes, creating long lines at Seattle-Tacoma International and other West Coast airports all morning and early afternoon, has been restored.
The failure caused delays at the Seattle-based airline’s entire network of 64 destinations, which also includes airports in Alaska, Mexico and Canada. Alaska Airlines has an average of 436 flights a day.
Some flights were canceled, including those to international destinations.
The airline said the problem was caused when a Sprint fiber optic network was cut twice, and Alaska Airlines lost its connection to the SABRE ticketing system.
Sprint spokeswoman Crystal Davis in Reston, Va., said one cut occurred at a construction site along railroad tracks between Chicago and Milwaukee, and the other was somewhere between Portland and Seattle.
If there had been only one disruption, the computer system would’ve been able to reroute the traffic, Davis said.
She said today’s Alaska Airlines failure was caused by the combination of the two cuts. It also affected some other Sprint customers in parts of Washington, Oregon and California.
Peninsula Daily News photojournalist Keith Thorpe reported this morning that passenger lines were “serpentine” throughout the jammed Seattle-Tacoma International Airport terminal.
The technical problem left the airline unable to check in passengers starting at about 7:40 a.m., said Alaska Airlines spokeswoman Bobbie Egan.
