Passengers travelling through airports in Australia, including Melbourne and Sydney, have experienced significant delays following an IT issue with the country’s automated self-service border control machines.
The IT systems outage affected the SmartGate passport control machines and delayed both inbound and outbound travelers. The incident caused long waits in processing passengers’ passports at all of Australia’s international airports. Although the issue has now been resolved, Australian Border Force (ABF) said delays are still expected.
According to reports on social media, some passengers at Sydney Airport’s international terminal were forced to wait 90 minutes before being processed through border control. ABF released a statement saying that “additional ABF staff have been deployed to process passengers at international airports”.
