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At least 229 flights have been cancelled

A massive airline system failure has left thousands of travellers facing lengthy delays. Alaska Airlines called for a temporary ground stop early on Friday morning (October 24) which resulted in at least 229 flights being axed.

The number of passengers – including Britons – who may have been delayed or impacted remains unclear. Horizon Air, a subsidiary of Alaska Airlines, was also hit by the disruption. Flight operations have now resumed.

The carrier emphasised that safety was never compromised during the breakdown, which stemmed from a malfunction at the airline’s primary data centre. Matas Cenys, head of product at Saily, explained that even small technical faults can paralyse vital processes, creating chaos for travellers.

They explained: “Airlines today operate on highly interconnected digital systems. When one system fails, the effects can spread across the entire network, grounding flights and disrupting operations. This is why Alaska Airlines’ recent outage, while labeled a ‘technical error’, caused widespread cancellations and delays. Even minor glitches can freeze critical processes because redundancy systems are not always perfect.

“Airlines’ digital systems are like a row of dominoes. Each system – scheduling, crew assignments, baggage, gates – depends on the one before it. If a single one falls, even from something small, like a database error, it can trigger a chain reaction that stops the whole operation. Most passengers never see these links, but that’s how flights keep running on time.

“There’s also a cybersecurity overlap. Even when outages are accidental, system downtime can create potential opportunities for attackers to exploit vulnerabilities. During a disruption, normal safeguards and monitoring may be reduced or delayed, allowing malicious actors to target systems before defences are fully restored.

“Travel runs on trust that systems will work, flights will depart, and bags will arrive. Every outage chips away that confidence. Rebuilding it will require transparency and visible investment in resilience.

“Every outage has a huge human cost. Travelers get stranded in airports, tired and nervous, and airport workers have to operate under stress trying to manage the chaos. This incident should serve as a reminder to the entire travel and tech industry to reassess and reinforce their IT systems.”

ALASKA Airlines was forced to ground all planes across the US on Thursday after being hit by an IT outage.

It’s the second time in three months that the carrier has been forced to halt all operations.

The outage has since sparked widespread travel chaos across the US. 

More than 200 Alaska Airlines flights were delayed on Thursday, and more than 100 canceled, according to FlightAware data.

More than 300 flights heading out of Dallas and Chicago were delayed.

Over 140 planes jetting out of Seattle airport were delayed, according to FlightAware.

Federal aviation chiefs issued a ground stop for Alaska Airlines’ entire fleet just after 7:30pm local time on Thursday.

Passengers in Seattle airport were seen lounging on their suitcases in the terminal as they waited for information.

Luggage was piling up in the airport’s baggage reclaim area.

Airport staffers had to check labels to reunite passengers with their bags.

Others managed to get onto their planes but were left sitting on the tarmac.

Pilots told passengers on board jets they would be taking off but planes didn’t move.

“They were like, okay, we’re going to be taking off, it’s an hour fifty-eight to Burbank, and then we didn’t move,” Wilder McCullough, who was heading to California, told KOMO-TV.

Travelers in Austin, Texas, said gates were jammed, as reported by CNN.

Airline bosses have since spoken out and have apologized for any disruption.

“We apologize for the inconvenience,” the carrier posted on X.

“If you’re scheduled to fly tonight, please check your flight status before heading to the airport.”

Some travelers opted not to rebook canceled flights and decided to drive 16 hours to reach their destinations, as per the NBC affiliate KING-TV.

The outage is not a cyberattack and services are gradually being restored.

Passengers have been warned to expect delays on Friday.

Alaska Airlines was hit with an IT outage in July, which also sparked widespread chaos. 

The airline is the fifth largest in the US, with a fleet of more than 200 planes.

Meanwhile, the government shutdown is now in its third week.

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Federal officials have warned passengers to expect delays at airport security checkpoints.

Transportation Security Administration staffers are considered essential workers but they are not being paid as it stands.

WASHINGTON — Fox news made its way to Capitol Hill on Tuesday.

Rep. Ami Bera (D-Elk Grove) identified himself as the victim of a fox attack. Bera, a doctor, told reporters he was walking near a Senate office building Monday when he felt something around his ankle.

“Yeah, I was just walking, as I often would, over by that park over by Russell [Senate Office Building] and felt something lunge — totally unprovoked, right — at the back of my leg,” Bera said, adding that he was thankful he had an umbrella with him to help fend off the wild animal. “It felt like a small dog.”

The disclosure of a fox attack on a member of Congress followed a memo that went out Tuesday warning of possible fox dens on Capitol grounds.

The Office of the Sergeant at Arms sent an alert notifying members of Congress and staff that U.S. Capitol Police had received reports Monday of people being attacked or bitten by a fox.

The notice, which was also forwarded to journalists who cover Congress, described the locations of two encounters and said Capitol Police had received a call Tuesday morning about a fox approaching staff near an intersection.

“There are possibly several fox dens on Capitol grounds,” the notification said. “Animal Control is currently on the grounds seeking to trap and relocate any foxes they find. Foxes are wild animals that are very protective of their dens and territory. Please do not approach any fox you see.”

Bera said the bite didn’t appear to puncture through his sock and into his skin. He said he will take a seven-shot anti-rabies regimen as a precaution and advised everyone on Capitol grounds to take encounters with wild animals seriously.

He tweeted that he is “healthy and back at work serving the people of #CA07.”

A Politico reporter said she was also bitten by a fox as she was leaving the Capitol on Tuesday, because “that’s of course something I expect in THE MIDDLE OF DC.”

Shortly after, Capitol Police broke some news of its own: It captured a fox.

A parody Twitter account was created as the identity of the Capitol fox. It released a statement on its “illegal arrest.”

“As a fox, I cannot speak. And too often — I have nobody to speak for me,” the statement began.

“Today, I was forcibly removed from my den by very scary and mean individuals,” it continued. “I am innocent of the crimes in question. This will not be the end.”

President Trump warned the country’s top ranking military officials Tuesday that they could be headed to “war” with U.S. citizens, signaling a major escalation in the ongoing legal battle over his authority to deploy soldiers to police American streets.

“What they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles — they’re very unsafe places, and we’re going to straighten them out one-by-one,” Trump said in an address to top brass in Quantico, Va. “That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.”

Commanders should use American cities as “training grounds,” the president said.

Trump’s words provoked instant pushback. Oregon has already filed a legal challenge, and experts expressed concern that what the president described is against the law.

“He is suggesting that they learn how to become warriors in American cities,” said Daniel C. Schwartz, former general counsel at the National Security Agency, who heads the legal team at National Security Leaders for America. “That should scare everybody. It’s also boldly illegal.”

The use of soldiers to assist with federal immigration raids and crowd control at protests and otherwise enforce civilian laws has been a point of contention with big city mayors and blue state governors for months, beginning with the deployment of thousands of federalized National Guard troops and hundreds of Marines to Los Angeles in early June.

That deployment was illegal, a federal judge ruled last month. In a scorching 52-page decision, U.S. District Court Judge Charles R. Breyer barred soldiers under Trump’s command from carrying out law enforcement duties across California, warning of a “national police force with the President as its chief.”

Yet hundreds of troops remained on the streets of Los Angeles while the matter was under litigation. With the case still moving through the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, hundreds more are now set to arrive in Portland, Ore., with another hundred reportedly enroute to Chicago — all over the objections of state and local leaders.

“Isolated threats to federal property should not be enough to warrant this kind of response,” said Eric J. Segall, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law. “The threat has to be really serious, and I don’t think the Trump administration has made that case.”

Others agreed.

“I’m tremendously worried,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law. “Using the military for domestic law enforcement is something that’s characteristic of authoritarian regimes.”

Oregon’s attorney general filed a lawsuit Monday alleging the president had applied a “baseless, wildly hyperbolic pretext” to send in the troops. Officials in Illinois, where the Trump administration has made Chicago a focal point of immigration enforcement, are also poised to file a challenge.

Although the facts on the ground are different legally, the Oregon suit is a near copy-paste of the California battle making its way through the courts, experts said.

“That’s exactly the model that they’re following,” said Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law.

Unlike the controversial decision to send National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., in August, the Los Angeles and Portland deployments have relied on an esoteric subsection of the law, which allows the president to federalize troops over the objection of state governments in certain limited cases.

California’s challenge to those justifications has so far floundered in court, with the 9th Circuit finding in June that judges must be “highly deferential” to the president’s interpretation of facts on the ground. That case is under review by a larger panel of judges.

In a memo filed Monday, California Deputy Solicitor General Christopher D. Hu warned that the decision had emboldened the administration to deploy troops elsewhere, citing Portland as an example.

“Defendants apparently believe that the June 7 memorandum — issued in response to events in Los Angeles — indefinitely authorizes the deployment of National Guard troops anywhere in the country, for virtually any reason,” Hu wrote. “It is time to end this unprecedented experiment in militarized law enforcement and conscription of state National Guard troops outside the narrow conditions allowed by Congress.”

Experts warn the obscure 19th century law at the heart of the debate is vague and “full of loopholes,” worrying some who see repeated deployment as a slippery slope to widespread, long-term military occupations.

“That has not been our experience at least since the Civil War,” Schwartz said. “If we become accustomed to seeing armed uniformed service personnel in our cities, we risk not objecting to it, and when we stop objecting to it, it becomes a norm.”

The joint address to military leaders in Virginia on Tuesday further stoked those fears.

“We’re under invasion from within,” the president admonished generals and admirals gathered in the auditorium. “No different from a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms.”

He touted the move in August to create a “quick reaction force” to “quell civil disturbances” — a decree folded into his executive order expanding the D.C. troop deployment.

“George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Grover Cleveland, George Bush and others all used the armed forces to keep domestic order and peace,” Trump said. “Now they like to say, oh, you’re not allowed to use the military.”

Those historic cases have some important differences with 2025, experts say.

When President Cleveland sent troops to break up a railroad strike and tamp down mob violence against Chinese immigrants, he invoked the Insurrection Act. So did 15 other presidents, including Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and George H.W. Bush.

Experts stress that Trump has pointedly not used the act, despite name-checking it often in his first term.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday largely avoided the theme of “enemies within,” instead extolling the “warrior ethos” at the heart of his military reform project. He railed against what he saw as the corrupted culture of the modern military — as well as its aesthetic shortcomings.

“It’s tiring to look out at combat formations and see fat troops,” Hegseth said. “It’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon. It’s a bad look.”

As deployments multiply across the country, experts said they were watching what the appellate division and ultimately the Supreme Court will decide.

“It will be a test for the Supreme Court,” Schwartz said. “Whether they are willing to continue to allow this president to do whatever he wants to do in clear violation of constitutional principles, or whether they will restrain him.”

QUANTICO, Va. — President Trump revealed that he wants to use American cities as training grounds for the armed forces and joined Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday in declaring an end to “woke” culture before an unusual gathering of hundreds of top U.S. military officials who were abruptly summoned to Virginia from around the world.

Hegseth announced new directives for troops that include “gender-neutral” or “male-level” standards for physical fitness, while Trump bragged about U.S. nuclear capabilities and warned that “America is under invasion from within.”

“After spending trillions of dollars defending the borders of foreign countries, with your help we’re defending the borders of our country,” Trump said.

Hegseth had called military leaders to the Marine Corps base in Quantico, near Washington, without publicly revealing the reason until this morning. His address largely focused on his own long-used talking points that painted a picture of a military that has been hamstrung by “woke” policies, and he said military leaders should “do the honorable thing and resign” if they don’t like his new approach.

Meetings between top military brass and civilian leaders are nothing new, but the gathering had fueled intense speculation about the summit’s purpose given the haste with which it was called and the mystery surrounding it.

Admirals and generals from conflict zones in the Middle East and elsewhere were summoned for a lecture on race and gender in the military, underscoring the extent to which the country’s culture wars have emerged as a front-and-center agenda item for Hegseth’s Pentagon, even at a time of broad national security concerns across the globe.

‘We will not be politically correct’

Trump is used to boisterous crowds of supporters who laugh at his jokes and applaud his boasts during his speeches. But he wasn’t getting that kind of soundtrack from the generals and admirals in attendance.

In keeping with the nonpartisan tradition of the armed services, the military leaders sat mostly stone-faced through Trump’s politicized remarks, a contrast from when rank-and-file soldiers cheered during Trump’s speech at Fort Bragg this summer.

During his nearly hour-long speech, Hegseth said the U.S. military has promoted too many leaders for the wrong reasons based on race, gender quotas and “historic firsts.”

“The era of politically correct, overly sensitive don’t-hurt-anyone’s-feelings leadership ends right now at every level,” Hegseth said.

That was echoed by Trump, who said “the purposes of America military is not to protect anyone’s feelings. It’s to protect our republic.″

″We will not be politically correct when it comes to defending American freedom,” Trump said. “And we will be a fighting and winning machine.”

Loosening disciplinary rules

Hegseth said he is loosening disciplinary rules and weakening hazing protections, putting a heavy focus on removing many of the guardrails the military had put in place after numerous scandals and investigations

He said he was ordering a review of “the department’s definitions of so-called toxic leadership, bullying and hazing to empower leaders to enforce standards without fear of retribution or second guessing.”

The defense secretary called for “changes to the retention of adverse information on personnel records that will allow leaders with forgivable, earnest, or minor infractions to not be encumbered by those infractions in perpetuity.”

“People make honest mistakes, and our mistakes should not define an entire career,” Hegseth said. “Otherwise, we only try not to make mistakes.”

Bullying and toxic leadership has been the suspected and confirmed cause behind numerous military suicides over the past several years, including the very dramatic suicide of Brandon Caserta, a young sailor who was bullied into killing himself in 2018.

A Navy investigation found that Caserta’s supervisor’s “noted belligerence, vulgarity and brash leadership was likely a significant contributing factor in (the sailor)’s decision to end his own life.”

Gender-neutral physical standards

Hegseth used the platform to slam environmental policies and transgender troops while talking up his and Trump’s focus on “the warrior ethos” and “peace through strength.”

Hegseth said the department has been told from previous administrations that “our diversity is our strength,” which he called an “insane fallacy.”

“They had to put out dizzying DEI and LGBTQE+ statements. They were told females and males are the same thing, or that males who think they’re females is totally normal,” he said, adding the use of electric tanks and the COVID vaccine requirements to the list as mistaken policies.

Hegseth said this is not about preventing women from serving.

“But when it comes to any job that requires physical power to perform in combat, those physical standards must be high and gender neutral,” he said. “If women can make it excellent, if not, it is what it is. If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it. That is not the intent, but it could be the result.”

Hegseth’s speech came as the country faces a potential government shutdown this week and as Hegseth, who has hammered home a focus on lethality, has taken several unusual and unexplained actions, including ordering cuts to the number of general officers and firings of other top military leaders.

Hegseth has championed the military’s role in securing the U.S.-Mexico border, deploying to American cities as part of Trump’s law enforcement surges, and carrying out strikes on boats in the Caribbean that the administration says targeted drug traffickers.

Finley, Toropin and Vucci write for the Associated Press. Finley and Toropin reported from Washington. AP writer Sylvie Corbet in Paris contributed to this report.