Australian airports hit by outage at immigration counters
Qantas planes are seen at Kingsford Smith International Airport in Sydney, Australia, Mar 18, 2020. (File photo: REUTERS/Loren Elliott)
SYDNEY: A technical outage crippled all of Australia's major airports on Friday (Nov 8) morning, 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 travellers, adding, "the issue is currently being rectified and systems are slowly returning online".
No flights have been affected at Australia's busiest airport in Sydney, a spokesperson said by email, but added, "inbound and outbound queues are longer than usual".
In an update, the ABF said it "has been working to restore a technical outage impacting both inbound and outbound passengers at international airports nationwide this morning".
The issue was resolved by midday, said the ABF, adding that the cause of the technical issue remains under investigation.
