Gold Coast Airport brought to standstill by outage

An IT systems outage brought Gold Coast Airport to a standstill on Monday morning, with the impact felt across the nation.

Hundreds of passengers were unable to check in for their flights or collect their bags due to the airport-wide tech issue which hit at 5am.

The outage affected all check-in counters and baggage claim carousels with passengers claiming they were not told anything.

Flight information was also down, with airport staff forced to manually check-in customers.

Airport CEO Marion Charlton admitted it "temporarily brought the operation pretty much to a stand still".

Out of 16 flights scheduled to depart before 9.30am, only three took off.

From 11 arrivals, only four made it to the tarmac.

Two planes were diverted to Brisbane Airport.

By 10.30am systems were back online, but the impacts remained with delays and cancellations across the country.