Passengers of Virgin Blue Airlines were distraught yesterday as about 150 flights were significantly delayed in key cities of Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, as a power outage caused its data centre to breakdown.

Airport reservations system between about 8am and 9.30am on Sunday morning were inaccessible causing major delays in flights.

Virgin Blue put an acknowledgment of the problem online with a statement posted on its website: "The check-in and online booking systems were "briefly impacted", "immediately rectified" and all systems were now "running normally."

"As a result there have been some flight delays this morning," the message said.

A related report of the Sydney Morning Herald said that some exasperated travellers at the cited airports were made to wait for more than two hours and some cancellations were even made.

The report added that the delay was due to the power supply outage experienced inside its outsourced data centre, which maintains the reservation system.

"The data centre switched over to its back-up power but that caused a "connectivity issue" with the computer terminals located at the airport check-in counters," a company spokesperson said quoted by SMH.