All of Australia’s international airports faced major disruptions today. A statewide passport system failure caused significant disruptions for travelers. In reality the systemic problem mostly impacted Melbourne and Sydney airports, where extensive lines developed as travelers waited to be processed. Luckily, the issue was fixed by this afternoon, enabling the backlog of travelers to pass through.
This outage left international travelling Canadian citizens with thousands of dollars worth of delays in returning home at many of our country’s major airports. At Melbourne International Airport, long lines of frustrated passengers stretched through the terminal as they waited for their documents to be processed. Similar scenes played out in the international departures section of Sydney. Things got real really fast as hundreds of new passengers came into the terminal to catch their flights.
Adelaide International Airport remained largely undisturbed by the technological glitch. They only had one international flight scheduled for the morning with another not due until the evening. This cut capacity so that when Melbourne and Sydney floundered, chaos barely touched the operations in Adelaide.
In a statement, the Australian Border Force (ABF) said it understood the inconvenience caused by the outage. “We wish to thank travellers for their patience during this time,” stated an ABF spokesperson. In an effort to manage the situation, Melbourne Airport officials confirmed that “[the] ABF is processing passengers manually,” which helped to alleviate some of the pressure as the systems were restored.
This incident is all too similar to a technical failure that occurred last November. That disaster severely damaged the SmartGate kiosks across the country a few weeks later. Most concerningly, that two-hour outage triggered fears over the stability of Australia’s backup passport processing systems.
Over the afternoon and into the night, things started to look up. Passengers who’d been waiting for ages finally began to clear the terminals! Now that the technical issue has been fixed, passengers can return to normal operations at Melbourne and Sydney airports smoothly and without other disruption. Yet many travelers continue to be disappointed by the missed connections that they experienced.
