Border Force IT outage knocks airport smartgates offline

International passengers arriving at Australian international airports faced delays for most of Monday due to a nationwide IT systems outage affecting only inbound smartgates.

Australian Border Force acknowledged the problems in a tweet early on Monday afternoon, though Brisbane Airport first reported issues just before 10am AEDT.

“We’re working to resolve IT systems issues intermittently impacting inbound passenger processing at international airports,” ABF said. “Outbound passenger processing is not affected.”

“Staff have been deployed to help minimise delays. We apologise for any inconvenience caused by this outage.”

By 5:15pm AEST, ABF said the issues had been resolved. iTnews has contacted the agency for further information on the issues.

The outage, which is the third to hit ABF IT systems this year, is impacting only ABF’s ageing fleet of IDEMIA arrivals smartgates, first introduced to airport arrivals halls in 2007.

The arrivals smartgates, which are currently the subject of multi-million dollar upgrade, were to be replaced from last financial year.

But, as iTnews revealed earlier this year, problems with the upgrade forced the Department of Home Affairs to pause the trial and wider rollout of next generation smartgates from Vision-Box.

No update on the project has been provided by the department since the pause of the trial, despite handing incumbent provider IDEMIA a new $30 million contract to refurbish the same smartgates.

Late last month, the Department of Home Affairs removed all mention of the smartgate upgrade from its website.