A 30-minute computer system outage at Miami International Airport on Wednesday evening delayed flights in and out of at least two South Florida airports for up to two hours.

The malfunction interrupted an automatic transfer of information between the control tower radar room at MIA and the region's air traffic control center, located at 7500 NW 58th St., said Kathleen Bergen, public affairs manager for the Federal Aviation Administration in Atlanta.

The MIA tower handles flights within 50 miles of the airport, while the air traffic control center handles flights beyond that distance, she said. Bergen said it wasn't immediately known how many flights into and out of MIA were affected. ''The system would not hand off the information automatically, so they had to make manual handoffs by making phone calls,'' she said. ``When you have to make manual handoffs that slows things down.''

The outage began at 5:55 p.m. and was restored at 6:25 p.m. Technicians had to wait 30 minutes to allow controllers to guide airplanes already in the air to safe landings before rebooting the computer system, she said.

In Broward, where the system outage was made worse by stormy weather, 23 inbound and outbound flights scheduled for Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport experienced delays, said airport spokesman Jim Reynolds. Arriving flights were delayed about two hours, while departing flights were delayed by about an hour, he said.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz,