Spirit Airlines' site crashes in latest airline IT issue

Spirit Airlines' website was down for several hours Wednesday, leaving customers unable to book flights online directly with the carrier. The airline's site failed before noon Eastern time but appeared to be functioning normally about 4 hours later. A Spirit spokesman said flights were not affected. He said he did not know the cause of the outage. While its site was down, Spirit tweeted a link to an online travel agency where customers could book flights. Computer outages are not unusual at airlines. Most carriers operate IT systems that are a mix of old and new applications, making them more vulnerable to problems. <br/>