Corporate mobility teams have been put on high alert after the Australian Border Force (ABF) confirmed that almost every major immigration IT platform will go dark for scheduled maintenance from 8:30 pm AEDT Friday 28 November to 12 noon Saturday 29 November. The 15-hour outage will take down ImmiAccount, eLodgement, Visa Entitlement Verification Online (VEVO), eMedical, LEGENDcom and the APEC Business Travel Card (ABTC) portal, as well as a dozen ancillary systems.
While planned maintenance windows are not unusual, the breadth and timing of this shutdown have raised eyebrows. The last business day of the month is traditionally when corporate mobility teams lodge last-minute renewal and nomination applications to ensure employees or assignees do not fall on to a bridging visa with restricted work rights. HR managers have just days to accelerate filings or risk interrupted assignments and lost billable hours.
![Australian Border Force to shut down online visa systems for 15 hours on 28-29 November]()
During the blackout employers will be unable to run VEVO checks, education providers will be locked out of uploading Confirmation of Enrolment data and travellers will not be able to pay for or submit online visa or citizenship applications. ABF is urging any applicant whose visa expires on 28 November to file early; otherwise they could default to a Bridging Visa E, which offers no Medicare access and bars most forms of work.
Organisations with high-volume mobility pipelines—IT contractors, healthcare recruiters and universities among them—are scrambling to reschedule workflows. Several Big 4 accounting firms have already issued internal advisories asking partners to avoid booking new inbound travel for assignees over the long weekend, citing the risk of last-minute travel authorisations being stuck in limbo.
On the upside, ABF says the upgrade will provide "critical security patches and capacity boosts" that should improve system stability ahead of the peak January student-visa rush. A post-deployment status bulletin is expected at 2 pm AEDT on 29 November.
While planned maintenance windows are not unusual, the breadth and timing of this shutdown have raised eyebrows. The last business day of the month is traditionally when corporate mobility teams lodge last-minute renewal and nomination applications to ensure employees or assignees do not fall on to a bridging visa with restricted work rights. HR managers have just days to accelerate filings or risk interrupted assignments and lost billable hours.
During the blackout employers will be unable to run VEVO checks, education providers will be locked out of uploading Confirmation of Enrolment data and travellers will not be able to pay for or submit online visa or citizenship applications. ABF is urging any applicant whose visa expires on 28 November to file early; otherwise they could default to a Bridging Visa E, which offers no Medicare access and bars most forms of work.
Organisations with high-volume mobility pipelines—IT contractors, healthcare recruiters and universities among them—are scrambling to reschedule workflows. Several Big 4 accounting firms have already issued internal advisories asking partners to avoid booking new inbound travel for assignees over the long weekend, citing the risk of last-minute travel authorisations being stuck in limbo.
On the upside, ABF says the upgrade will provide "critical security patches and capacity boosts" that should improve system stability ahead of the peak January student-visa rush. A post-deployment status bulletin is expected at 2 pm AEDT on 29 November.
