International airport delays as SmartGates go down en masse

An outage of airport SmartGates across the country has been resolved but not before causing widespread disruption.

International travellers are experiencing big delays due to an outage in so-called SmartGates at airports across Australia. Picture: Jeremy Piper

A technical outage affecting international airport SmartGates has been resolved by Australian Border Force, after causing widespread disruption to overseas travellers.

The cause of the problem remained under investigation after more than 200 SmartGate kiosks were brought to a halt, or malfunctioned in some way.

Busy Sydney and Melbourne Airports were the worst affected, with hundreds of people forced to wait for ABF officers to process passengers manually as the SmartGates sat idle.

An ABF spokesman said the outage impacted SmartGate kiosks for inbound and outbound passengers, at international airports nationwide.

“Additional ABF officers are being surged into work areas to manually process passengers and provide as minimal disruption as possible,” the spokesman said.

“The issue is currently being rectified and systems are slowly returning online. We appreciate travellers’ patience as we continue to work through the issue.”

A Melbourne Airport spokesman said that at the peak of the outage, only one in 10 SmartGates was operational, meaning most passengers had to be processed manually.

Even after the issues were resolved the gates were “opening and then closing on people” causing further disruption.

Smartgates at Sydney Airport were last year revealed as the faultiest in the country. Picture: X (formerly Twitter)

Airport flight boards showed a number of international flights were delayed between 30 minutes and an hour in the morning peak due to the processing delays.

Sydney Airport encouraged travellers to allow plenty of time for processing through the T1 terminal.

The ABF only recently replaced all series 1 SmartGates with generation 3 arrival gates over the past year in an effort to “significantly reduce faults”.

In 2023, Sydney Airport arrival SmartGates were offline an average of 88 times a month while Melbourne saw an average eight issues a month.

Although the technology had been upgraded, insufficient numbers of SmartGates continued to cause problems, particularly at Melbourne Airport.

Whereas Sydney Airport had 87 SmartGates and kiosks in departures and arrivals, Melbourne had only 49 despite international passenger numbers exceeding pre-pandemic levels.

Brisbane had a total of 43 gates across departures and arrivals, and Perth Airport 30.

Originally published as International airport delays as SmartGates go down en masse