Qantas said the glitch was fixed shortly after, but the glitch was made worse by a baggage system failure in Melbourne and Sydney which broke down under extra stress.

In some situations, passengers’ luggage had to be flown separately in order to keep services operating.

The airline has since apologised to customers for the delays.

The computer program in question, Amadeus, is relied on by between 50 to 80 airlines around the world which were also reported to have been experiencing similar problems.

A similar computer crash occurred in November last year, with spokesman for Qantas, David Epstein saying that the airline was still waiting for an explanation.

He said that Amadeus was usually a very reliable system, but saying that, not all systems work all of the time and from time to time they do go down.

He said that the airline tries to manage those things but dealing with a worldwide system and multiple airlines, sometimes it can be a bit hard to get things up and running straight away.