Passengers at Stansted Airport missed flights when a baggage system failure plunged departures into "chaos".
Travellers hoping to depart on Sunday said they were faced with long queues around the terminal as staff raced to manually process luggage.
Stansted said its system, which recently underwent a £70m upgrade, was thought to have suffered a power issue.
An airport spokesman apologised for disruption and said the problem had been fixed.
Several families who spoke to the BBC at Stansted described chaotic scenes that had put a downer on long-awaited holidays.
Neil and Gemma Jackson arrived at Stansted at 04:30 BST after travelling from Kent with their children. The trip to Lanzarote is their first in two years.
"It started off ordinarily, we queued up to check in and that progressed quite quickly," said Mrs Jackson.
"But where it really went off the rails was we were all advised to drop our bags at a particular zone. There was absolute chaos.
"Every single passenger from every airline seemed to be in the same queue. There was no crowd control, it snaked around the entire airport, people were pushing in.
"We waited politely at security control. Then our gate closed and we were turned away."
Ellie Winstanley, 27, who was flying with Ryanair, also said she was advised to join a queue that "circled the entire airport".
"Then the conveyor belt stopped working," she said. "We rushed through security which was fairly quick and then we sprinted and they closed the gate on time.
"I've got asthma so I was just trying to get a break. I felt for this other woman with two kids who looked teary and so incredibly stressed."
Trinity Hammatt, 21, from Haverhill, and Thomas Hammond, 21, from Saffron Walden, were heading to Valencia and said they arrived at the airport three hours in advance - as advised by Ryanair.
"We had to wait in that awful long queue because the belts are down," Ms Hammatt said. "It's completely put a downer on the whole thing.
"Everyone we spoke to brushed us off. I understand it's busy and manic, but it's been overwhelming.
"No-one is taking responsibility."
The baggage system upgrade in May involved replacing ageing conveyor belts and chutes with 2.4km (7,874ft) of track and 180 automated carts.
An airport spokesman said he believed the system had suffered a power issue.
"Contingency measures were immediately put in place with our airlines to mitigate disruption and manually process baggage while engineers worked to fix the issue." he said.
"The system is now operating as normal but passengers are still asked to arrive at the airport at least three hours before their flight departs in accordance with their airline's latest advice."
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2021-10-17 16:42:52Z
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