Qantas passengers again faced delays even if the unions and the air carrier's labor dispute is under arbitration with Fair Work Australia. The culprit this time was computer outage.

The technical problem was actually an effect of a national system outage which affected Qantas's check-in system resulting in inability of air travelers to use the airline's self-service check-in kiosks. As a result, the check-in machines could not read bar codes and frequent flyer cards, and print boarding passes.

Qantas's check-in staff instead wrote manually boarding cards, which led to delays since the air carrier's baggage check-in counters were undermanned. Passengers who have check-in luggage were moved to later flights.

However, Qantas advised passengers that they could still check-in online or on their smartphones. The outage started at 6:40 a.m. and lasted until 8:50 a.m.

The outage affected all Australian airports that service Qantas flights and started just when passengers from Los Angeles and Auckland were checking in.

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