Lufthansa departures briefly hit by computer outage - airport staff

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Lufthansa and Air France were briefly hit by computer problems preventing them from boarding passengers on Thursday evening, airport and airline staff said on Thursday.

A gate agent at Frankfurt airport, Lufthansa's main hub, had announced the airline was having "a computer system breakdown worldwide," preventing passengers from getting on planes, but shortly afterwards was able to resume boarding, a Reuters reporter at the scene said.

The airline said on its Twitter account the systems were back up and running after a global outage.

Twitter users spoke of similar boarding delays at Air France, although they were also quickly resolved. A spokesman for Air France said there had been an IT problem.

Some North American carriers have in recent months had to ground flights as a result of computer glitches, although such instances have been rare in Europe.

In January for example, United Airlines had to ground all domestic flights for about an hour one Sunday evening, causing a cascade of delays throughout the United States.

Last August, a power outage hit computer systems at Delta Air Lines and led to thousands of flights being cancelled.

(Reporting by Tim Hepher; Writing by Victoria Bryan; Editing by Elaine Hardcastle)

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