Air traffic to and from Amsterdam Schiphol airport was seriously disrupted on Wednesday because of an outage at the airport's main fuel supplier that kept dozens of flights on the ground.

A fault in the systems of Aircraft Fuel Supply, a third-party company that controls the supply of fuel to aircraft, meant at least 70 planes could not be provided with the fuel they needed to depart.

"Almost 180 flights have been canceled by airlines," the airport said early on Wednesday evening, adding that the amount of incoming flights had been reduced to one third of normal capacity.

Airline Air France-KLM said it expected problems to persist on Thursday, possibly leading to more cancellations then.

The only planes able to take off were those that still had enough fuel in their tanks upon arrival in Amsterdam, a Schiphol spokeswoman said.

"Aircraft Fuel Supply are working hard to find a solution, but as yet it is unclear how long this will take", she added.

Wednesday was one of the busier days in the summer holiday period at Schiphol, Europe's third largest airport in number of passengers per year.