Australian airports hit by outage at immigration counters

By Reuters November 7, 2024 | 08:57 pm PT

Qantas planes are seen at Kingsford Smith International Airport in Sydney, Australia, March 18, 2020. Photo by Reuters

A technical outage crippled all of Australia's major airports on Friday, leading to long queues at international terminals after the disruption of automated kiosks for identity and facial recognition, authorities said.

In a statement the Australian Border Force (ABF) said immigration staff were added to manually process travelers, adding, "The issue is currently being rectified and systems are slowly returning online."

No flights have been affected at Australia's busiest airport of Sydney, however, a spokesperson said by email, but added, "Inbound and outbound queues are longer than usual."

It was not immediately clear when operations would return to normal.