The airline confirmed that the failure of a third-party piece of hardware grounded flights, underscoring the fact that even systems that are multiply-redundant can go down.

Hundreds of Alaska Airlines flights and thousands of passengers’ travel plans were disrupted over the weekend and well into Monday following a “significant IT outage” that resulted in the grounding of planes for about three hours.

Alaska Airlines has revealed that an "unexpected failure" of a critical piece of hardware caused an IT outage that led to its entire fleet being grounded.