Australian Border Force (ABF) has issued an urgent systems-outage notice confirming that every frontline immigration IT platform – including ImmiAccount, eLodgement, VEVO, eMedical, LEGENDcom and the APEC Business Travel Card portal – will go offline from 8:30 pm AEDT Friday 28 November until 12 noon Saturday 29 November. The maintenance window coincides with the final business day of the month, traditionally a crunch point for visa renewals and year-end compliance filings.
During the 15-hour blackout, applicants will be unable to lodge or pay for visas, employers will not be able to run VEVO work-rights checks, and education providers will be locked out of uploading Confirmation of Enrolment data for international students. ABF says the upgrade will ‘harden security and improve performance’ ahead of the Christmas travel surge, when database queries typically double.
![Border Force to shut down all major online visa systems for 15 hours this weekend]()
Corporates are scrambling. Mobility teams have been advised to file any time-critical applications by COB Thursday and to print VEVO records for travellers transiting Australia over the weekend. Payroll departments that rely on VEVO batch files for right-to-work audits must switch to manual checks, while freight forwarders using the Trusted Trader interface have been told to expect delays at the border.
The breadth of the outage has revived memories of the 2023 migration-system crash that over-ran its window and left 35,000 applications queued. ABF insists contingency teams are on standby, but migration agents warn that any slippage could push affected visa-holders onto Bridging Visa E, stripping Medicare access and work rights.
Longer-term, the outage highlights the fragility of Australia’s ageing immigration tech stack. Industry groups are calling for accelerated funding of the Digital Passenger Journey program to reduce single-point-of-failure risk and to provide API access so third-party travel platforms can cache VEVO data during planned outages.
During the 15-hour blackout, applicants will be unable to lodge or pay for visas, employers will not be able to run VEVO work-rights checks, and education providers will be locked out of uploading Confirmation of Enrolment data for international students. ABF says the upgrade will ‘harden security and improve performance’ ahead of the Christmas travel surge, when database queries typically double.
Corporates are scrambling. Mobility teams have been advised to file any time-critical applications by COB Thursday and to print VEVO records for travellers transiting Australia over the weekend. Payroll departments that rely on VEVO batch files for right-to-work audits must switch to manual checks, while freight forwarders using the Trusted Trader interface have been told to expect delays at the border.
The breadth of the outage has revived memories of the 2023 migration-system crash that over-ran its window and left 35,000 applications queued. ABF insists contingency teams are on standby, but migration agents warn that any slippage could push affected visa-holders onto Bridging Visa E, stripping Medicare access and work rights.
Longer-term, the outage highlights the fragility of Australia’s ageing immigration tech stack. Industry groups are calling for accelerated funding of the Digital Passenger Journey program to reduce single-point-of-failure risk and to provide API access so third-party travel platforms can cache VEVO data during planned outages.
