Tech troubles beset Alaska Airlines’ website and app

Parts of Alaska Airlines’ website and mobile app went down Tuesday morning, preventing users from logging in to their accounts to book or view travel plans.

Alaska customers in the Tri-Cities reported mixed results when using the Alaska app on smartphones. However, the issue is not expected to affect Alaska flights into our out of the Tri-Cities Airport, which is owned and operated by the Port of Pasco.

The platforms displayed an error message after customers entered their login credentials.

“It seems this application has become very popular, and its available rate limit has been reached. Please retry after a few minutes,” the message read.

Alaska Airlines did not immediately respond to questions about the issue Tuesday morning.

“We have received reports that some guests are unable to access (the app) this morning,” an airline spokesperson said on X. “Our IT teams are addressing this issue as swiftly as possible.”

The outage appears to be contained to Alaska’s website and mobile app. It has not affected the airlines’ flights, as of Tuesday morning.

This is the fourth time the airline’s IT systems have been disrupted this year, though just two of those instances prevented planes from taking off as scheduled.

In July, a hardware failure at one of Alaska’s data centers led the airline to ground its planes for about three hours and cancel hundreds of flights. A separate IT issue again grounded the fleet for about eight hours in October.

Later that month, a Microsoft Azure cloud outage impacted Alaska’s website and mobile app.

Alaska hired third-party consulting firm Accenture to review its IT infrastructure after the second outage in October.

Downdetector, a website that tracks reports of IT outages for various companies and services, began to show reports of issues with Alaska Airlines’ platforms around 8 a.m. Tuesday.