Akashma Online News

By Marivel Guzman – Akashma News

✈️ Grounded in Code

🛑 Introduction: When the Skies Went Still

On the night of July 20, 2025, something unprecedented rippled through the terminals of airports across the United States. Alaska Airlines, a top-five U.S. carrier, grounded its entire fleet—over 200 aircraft—halting all operations for several hours. Passengers were stranded. Flight crews were displaced. No one knew exactly what was going on.

The official explanation? A “multi-redundant hardware failure” in the airline’s core data infrastructure. But in an era of escalating cyberattacks and suppressed disclosures, the magnitude and timing of the outage raised red flags far beyond the ticket counters.

💻 The Official Story: A Failure in the Heart of the System

According to Alaska Airlines’ statement, the issue stemmed from a third-party hardware failure inside one of its primary data centers. Despite redundant systems in place, the failure was significant enough to cripple critical flight operation systems, including:

Crew tracking and legal compliance systems

Weight and balance calculations (essential for safe takeoffs)

Flight planning and dispatch coordination

“Although we have multiple redundancies in place, a specific piece of hardware failed in an unexpected way,” the airline said in its public update.

Operations resumed after three hours, yet over 200 flights were cancelled, affecting nearly 16,000 passengers. The ripple effects continued into the following day, as aircraft and crews were repositioned and manually reconciled.

🧩 Not a Cyberattack? The Curious Timing

The airline emphasized:

“This was not a cybersecurity event.”

But skepticism persists. Here’s why:

🚨 1. Wave of Cyberattacks Preceding the Outage

Just days prior to Alaska’s shutdown, a major CrowdStrike update error caused massive outages globally—including at airports, banks, and hospitals. Though no directly related, it underscored how fragile digital infrastructure had become.

Meanwhile, Microsoft disclosed a critical vulnerability in its SharePoint servers and Office 365 platforms—systems often integrated into enterprise IT backbones like those used by airlines.

The outage was not a Microsoft Windows flaw directly, but rather a flaw in CrowdStrike Falcon that triggered the issue.

Security experts linked these flaws to active exploitation by Chinese and Russian state-backed groups (Reuters).

🔓 2. Suspicious Overlap with Hawaiian Airlines

In early July, Hawaiian Airlines also experienced a prolonged IT outage. Though publicly dismissed as unrelated, aviation security analysts noted similarities in timing, geographic targeting, and vendor ecosystem.

🛠️ 3. Redundancy Failure Is Extremely Rare

Most major airlines employ failover cloud clusters, distributed backup systems, and physical on-site redundancies. The fact that a “multi-redundant system” failed entirely, grounding every single aircraft, led many insiders to question whether the incident was more than just a broken hard drive.

“This is not normal. Even if a data center goes dark, there’s usually a regional backup. The scale suggests something hit both sides—primary and redundant,” said an anonymous Alaska tech contractor in a Reddit forum leak (unverified but circulating among aviation insiders).

🕵️‍♀️ Conspiracy Theories in Circulation

When facts remain vague, speculation fills the void. Among the conspiracy narratives:

🛰️ 1. “Backdoor Cyberattack” via Vendor Equipment

Some theorists point to nation-state backdoors hidden in third-party hardware, particularly if manufactured overseas. With U.S. intelligence agencies warning about supply chain vulnerabilities, it’s not unreasonable to consider that a subtle exploit could disrupt systems without leaving fingerprints.

🧠 2. AI Integration Sabotage

Alaska Airlines has publicly embraced AI-assisted route optimization and automated dispatch logic since 2024. Speculators believe a malfunction in these AI-based systems—or a malicious AI override—could have created systemic conflict that shut down safety-critical tools.

🛰️ 3. FAA or Homeland Security Gag Order

Another popular theory suggests that the grounding was not voluntary, but ordered by a federal agency based on classified intelligence—possibly tied to:

A hijack or sabotage attempt

A no-fly order tied to national security concerns

A test of airline compliance in cyberwarfare scenarios

“When you see a system-wide stop with vague reasons and no blame attribution, it’s often a fed trigger,” tweeted aviation security researcher Marcus Feld, before deleting the post.

🧠 The Fragile Skies: Aviation and the Cyber Frontier

Modern aviation relies on deeply integrated IT infrastructure, and the Alaska outage is not the first warning shot.

In January 2023, the FAA’s NOTAM system crashed, grounding all U.S. flights for hours—an incident later blamed on a corrupted database file during a software sync.

In December 2022, Southwest Airlines canceled thousands of flights due to a failure in its crew scheduling software.

In April 2024, Alaska again grounded its fleet due to bugs in weight and balance calculation tools.

Each time, we’re told it’s not a hack. But the frequency and similarity of these incidents suggest a larger pattern of over-reliance on aging, opaque, vendor-managed infrastructure.

🔒 Conclusion: A Breach or a Breakdown?

Was the Alaska Airlines grounding a hardware fluke, a cyber probe, or a silent security operation? Officially, it was just a glitch. But as passengers sat grounded, and pilots waited for dispatch clearance, a darker reality hovered above the tarmac:

Our skies aren’t secured by metal and jet fuel anymore—but by code. And when that code fails, so does everything else.