Sydney and Melbourne domestic airports are facing a nightmare morning of cancellations, with dozens of flights scrapped from timetables.

21 flights were cancelled in Sydney across the Qantas, Virgin Australia, Jetstar and Rex networks. Virgin dumped 10 flights, Qantas nixed eight, with two pulled from Jetstar and one from Rex.

Melbourne Airport faced similar struggles, with 20 flights scrapped as of 8.30am.

This included seven flights from Qantas, five from Emirates and Virgin Australia, two from American Airlines and one from British Airways.

The flights cancelled at both airports were between 6.30am and 7pm on Monday.

Earlier on Monday morning, Qantas battled to deal with nightmare queues at Melbourne Airport after a nationwide computer outage grounded flights on Sunday evening.

Travellers looking to jet from the Victorian capital to Sydney were met with huge lines snaking all the way to the international terminal as the airline struggled to deal with the “domino effect” caused by the IT glitch.

“(The queue) snakes all the way back pretty much to the international terminal,” Today reporter Christine Ahern said.

“On top of this, there’s a fairly long queue for the service desk as well because there are three cancelled flights to Sydney. So, people are trying to be rebooked on other flights.”

According to the carrier, the issues began at about 4.30pm on Sunday, with at least a dozen flights affected.

By Monday 7am, several people had taken to Twitter to share angry messages about their flights being cancelled.

The latest issue to hit the embattled airline has also led to renewed calls for CEO Alan Joyce to stand down.

“Hello @Qantas. Again flight cancellation W*F. ‘We are sorry we had to cancel your flight QF417 from Sydney at 06:45 on Mon 1 Aug’. Alan Joyce please resign,” wrote a Twitter user.

Qantas forced to increase costs

Recently, Qantas was also forced to cut several flights from their schedule, while hiking up the price of domestic flights due to higher fuel costs.

On Thursday, the airline said they had been pushed to “rebalance capacity and fares,” so they could increase the number of passengers flying on the remaining flights.

Prices saw an increase of up to 2.6 per cent, adding around an extra $10 per ticket. This comes as jet fuel has seen increases of 28 per cent throughout 2022, soaring to prices of around A$208 a barrel.

Speaking to 2GB’s Ben Fordham, Qantas Domestic and International CEO Andrew David said that flights would be reduced over July and August and apologised to customers.

“We are the national carrier, people have high expectations of us, we have high expectations of ourselves and clearly over the last few months we have not been delivering what we did pre-COVID,” he said.

“We have reduced some of our flying this month and we’re planning to do the same next month, recognising the operation pressures we have.”

- by Jessica Wang, news.com.au