Computer glitch cancels Alaska Airlines flights

Alaska Airlines and its Horizon Air affiliate canceled 140 flights Saturday, including one from Las Vegas, because a computer system used for flight planning failed.

The presidents of both airlines said in a joint video on YouTube that the system used for flight planning failed, causing the cancellations.

During the two-minute statement released late in the afternoon, they said the outage has resulted in the two airlines scrapping about 15 percent of their combined schedule. About 11,700 passengers have been affected.

“A transformer blew and that took down the central computer system for both Alaska and Horizon,” Alaska President Brad Tilden said.

The officials said the airlines were working to get the operations back to normal. Company spokesman Paul McElroy said many other flights were delayed, and customers had trouble getting flight-status updates on the airlines’ website because of the outage.

While most Alaska flights out of McCarran International Airport were only delayed today, at least one flight, a 4:25 p.m. flight to Seattle, was canceled. Passengers can check the status of both arrivals and departures at mccarran.com.

McElroy said stranded passengers would be rebooked on later planes or put on other airlines and Alaska will consider adding flights.