Chaos at Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra airports as check-in systems crash, leaving passengers stranded

A worldwide outage to a passenger check-in system has left travellers stranded in airports around Australia.

The check-in system believed to be at fault, Amadeus Altea, is used by 125 different airlines and has affected check-in processing at airports in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra as well as London, Auckland, Singapore, Tokyo and Hong Kong.

Qantas passengers have been affected, taking to social media to describe the chaos and long queues as airlines scurry to get their systems back up and running.

A Qantas spokesperson confirmed that there had been a systems outage but said that flights were continuing to depart from Sydney Airport.

Virgin Australia has not been affected, as it uses a different check-in system.

UK newspaper The Telegraph has reported that the problem has only affected Amadeus Altea software, a booking and check-in system used by multiple airlines.

Amadeus Altea confirmed to The Mirror that they were experiencing a network issue but that services were gradually being restored.

“Amadeus confirms that during the morning, we experienced a network issue that caused disruption to some of our systems," they said.

“As a result of the incident, customers experienced disruption to certain services.

“Amadeus technical teams took immediate action to identify the cause of the issue and restore services as quickly as possible. That action is ongoing with services gradually being restored.

“Amadeus regrets any inconvenience caused to customers.”

In Melbourne, travellers tweeted that there were problems for those with flights booked at Qatar Airways and Qantas.

At 9.23pm, Melbourne Airport tweeted that check-in was underway for affected flights.

It is the second major airport outage in a week after software failure created flight delays and cancellations around Australia on Monday.