Alaska Airlines has fixed the computer problem that delayed flights Monday across its 64-airport network on the West Coast and in Mexico and Canada. Operations are slowly returning to normal.

Flights to and from the Boise Airport resumed Monday afternoon. A couple of the Boise Airport's 16 daily Alaska Airlines flights were affected, said airport spokeswoman Patti Miller. They included flights to and from Portland and Seattle that were canceled, she said.

"It will take them a little while to recover, because it's a domino effect," Miller said shortly after 3 p.m.

She said travelers should check the status of their flights at the airport's website, www.iflyboise.com.

The problem was caused by a severed fiber optic line that cut the Seattle-based airline's connection to its ticketing system at 8:40 a.m. Mountain time.

Lines of frustrated passengers grew at the airline's Sea-Tac hub and at other airports as the company was unable to put passengers on planes, except by handwritten paperwork.

Alaska Airlines said the data connection was restored around 2 p.m. Mountain time.

Two fiber optic cuts occurred in the Sprint system. One was at a construction site along railroad tracks between Chicago and Milwaukee. The other was somewhere between Portland and Seattle, said Sprint spokeswoman Crystal Davis in Reston, Va.

"Typically if there's just one cut, traffic reroutes automatically," Davis said. "Because there were two cuts with hours of each other, it caused this disruption."

The airline told waiting passengers at Sea-Tac they could rebook later at no charge.

About half the flights at Sea-Tac are provided by Alaska Airlines or its sister airline, Horizon Air. Both are owned by Alaska Air Group.

No other airlines at Sea-Tac were affected, airport spokesman Perry Cooper said. But lines were out the door in the Alaska Airlines part of the terminal.

The company is the seventh-largest U.S. airline based on passenger traffic and is the dominant West Coast carrier. It has an average of 436 flights a day.

Reported by Doug Esser, Associated Press, and Audrey Dutton, Idaho Statesman.