by Monica Poling
Last updated: 8:03 PM ET, Sun September 24, 2017
Thousands of passengers at Australia's Sydney Airport were faced with massive delays Monday morning after the airport's air traffic control system suffered a malfunction.
A "power outage" is being blamed for the chaos, which the Sydney Morning Herald says affected the flight planning system that feeds into the radar system. "Without it, air traffic controllers cannot distinguish which plane is which," reports the SMH.
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The failure occurred at about 5:20 in the morning, just as many families were headed to the airport for what is the start of a school break and popular vacation period in Australia.
Reportedly a few inbound flights were able to land but all aircraft scheduled to depart from Sydney were delayed during the outage. Inbound domestic flights headed for Sydney were held at their airport of origin until the situation was rectified.
Some flights were also canceled.
[READMORE]READ MORE: Maintenance Mistake Causes Airport Delays[/READMORE]
The SMH reports that during the outage, the airport could process just 11 flights per hour, down from its normal capacity of 80 flights per hour.
The situation was eventually "resolved" at about 9:00 a.m., according to a tweet from the airport.
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