Alaska Airlines has revealed that an "unexpected failure" of a critical piece of hardware caused an IT outage that led to its entire fleet being grounded.

Alaska Airlines has revealed that its "significant" IT outage on Sunday night was not caused by hackers, but by hardware at one of its data centers failing.

Alaska Airlines and its regional subsidiary Horizon Air requested a ground stop to all flights Sunday night due to a computer system outage. The request to federal authorities kept Alaska and Horizon flights out of the air until the FAA said the stop was lifted after 2 a.m. ET. Monday.