An internet outage caused chaos for travelers at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on Saturday, and the Port of Seattle confirmed that the power outage had taken various systems offline.
Seattle International Airport confirmed in a short post on its official X account that the internet and web outage occurred at around 9 a.m. Saturday. By 1 p.m., various systems were still affected by the outage, and passengers were urged to check with their airlines to see if their flights were affected.
Despite the outages at various check-in systems, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport remains open and many flights are operating normally. Only 36 flights have been canceled from the airport so far, according to data provided by Flight Aware.
But passengers have complained of longer queues since airlines reverted to manual check-in procedures.
One passenger who was due to board a delayed British Airways flight from Seattle to London’s Heathrow airport on Saturday afternoon said check-in agents were relying on handwritten boarding passes and even taking photos of passengers’ passports on their cell phones.
The outage appears to be affecting systems across the Port of Seattle, but is not thought to be related to the wider outage. The Port of Seattle did not immediately confirm the cause of the outage.
The internet outage at Seattle International Airport on Saturday came just weeks after a bug in a CrowdStrike update caused travel disruptions around the world. While most airlines were able to quickly restore operations, Delta Air Lines is still facing intense scrutiny over its response to the outage.
Delta Air Lines continues to strongly blame CrowdStrike for the outage, which lasted several days, and has threatened to sue the airline unless it pays damages estimated at $500 million.
Subscribe to our newsletter
No spam, just a weekly roundup of the best aviation news you don’t want to miss.
