Hundreds of airline passengers have been caught up in an IT systems breakdown at Gold Coast Airport.
Passengers have been forced to wait more than three hours while airline staff revert to a manual check-in process.
Gold Coast Airport chief operations officer Marion Charlton said the problems were caused by an overnight power outage which impacted systems.
She said it impacted flight information, check-in systems, and some apron management systems.
"It temporarily brought the operation to pretty much a standstill this morning for our customers and our passengers," Ms Charlton said.
She said the issue was detected after 5am when people started to check in.
The outage meant that only three of the 16 scheduled departures managed to take off up to 9:30am, Ms Charlton said.
There were 11 arrivals scheduled, four of which were able to land at the Gold Coast.
She said the check-in system was up and running by about 10:30am and staff were working through the backlog.
ABC reporter Elloise Farrow-Smith tried to drop her mother off for a Sydney flight at 5am when she realised something was wrong.
"It's like Hotel California here really. You can check in but you can't check out," Farrow-Smith said.
"Planes have been coming in but I have noticed that they cancelled a lot of flights."
Farrow-Smith said her mother needed to be in Sydney for an urgent matter today.
"We are trying to get on another flight out of another airport because we have to be there," she said.
Christopher Devine is trying to get a connecting flight from Singapore through to Manchester in the United Kingdom.
"Its horrendous," Mr Devine said.
"I can't fault the airport staff, they have been great. But this is supposed to be an up-to-date airport.
"I don't understand how they haven't got a back-up system."
A spokesperson for Queensland Airports Limited, Carly Twyman, apologised to affected passengers.
"We are working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible, we apologise for the inconvenience," Ms Twyman said.
