I got up at 5:15a this morning to get my mom on a 6:50a flight from SEA to SJC. Checking with my sister she said the flight was a bit late. Luckily she was only late 20 minutes arriving in SJC as opposed to the next 4 + hours of cancelled flights when AlaskaAir's computer system was brought down during installation of a back-up power system blew a transformer.

This is why I couldn't check flight status this morning.

Systemwide Central Computer Outage

A systemwide central computer outage has caused delays to flights throughout the Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air network. We apologize for inconvenience this is causing our customers.

I wonder what the cost impact is of cancelling 95 + flights.

DALLAS (AP) - Alaska Airlines and its Horizon Air affiliate canceled 95 flights Saturday because a computer system used for flight planning failed.

How many of the AlaskaAir IT operations guys have learned some new things about facility operations. You'd think they could run the power system change during the window of time when AlaskaAir isn't running fleet operations. (update) The transformer failure happened at 3a this morning, so the maintenance was performed after hours, but a major transformer failure is not a quick repair.