An internet outage brought travel misery to Seattle Tacoma International Airport on Saturday as the Port of Seattle confirmed that various systems had been taken offline due to the blackout.
In a short post on its official X account, SeaTac confirmed the internet and web outage at around 9 am Saturday. By 1 pm, various systems were still affected by the outage and passengers were being encouraged to check with their airlines whether flights would be affected.
Despite the outage taking various check-in systems offline, SeaTac has remained operating, and many flights are still operating as normal. According to data supplied by Flight Aware, only 36 flights have so far been canceled from the airport.
Passengers have, however, complained of long lines with airlines reverting to manual processes to get customers checked in for their flights.
One passenger who was due to fly on a delayed British Airways flight from Seattle to London Heathrow on Saturday afternoon even said that check-in staff were relying on handwritten boarding passes and were taking photos of passengers’ passports on their phones.
The outage appears to be affecting system across the Port of Seattle, although it is not believed to be connected to a wider outage. The Port of Seattle did not immediately confirm the reason behind the outage.
Saturday’s internet issues at SeaTac come just weeks after the global CrowdStrike update bug caused travel chaos worldwide. Although most airlines were able to quickly recover their operations, Delta Air Lines is still facing intense scrutiny over its response to the outage.
Delta still firmly blames CrowdStrike for its days long operational meltdown and is threatening to sue the internet security firm unless it foots a compensation bill estimated to be as high as $500 million.
