Spirit Airlines says brief computer outage disrupts 16 flights

Reuters
FILE PHOTO: A Spirit Airlines airplane sits at a gate at the O'Hare Airport in Chicago, Illinois October 2, 2014. REUTERS/Jim Young

(Reuters) - Spirit Airlines Inc suffered a computer outage on Friday that lasted an hour and caused delayed departures of 16 flights, a spokesman for the airline said.

"We experienced a brief system outage this evening, but the issue is now resolved," Spirit spokesman Derek Dombrowski said.

"The outage lasted an hour and directly impacted 16 flights," Dombrowski said, adding that the company was investigating the cause of the problem.

Earlier, the airline asked the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration to ground all of its flights systemwide due to the computer problem, the FAA said in a tweet. The agency said about 30 minutes later that the ground stop had been canceled.

Spirit, a fast-growing U.S. budget airline, operates more than 400 daily flights to 60 destinations in the U.S., Latin America and the Caribbean.

(This version of the story was refiled to fix typographical error in paragraph 3)

(Reporting by Eric Beech; Editing by David Alexander and Sandra Maler)