Corporate mobility teams moving staff from Algeria to France face a short-lived but total shutdown of the France-Visas platform next week. Outsourcing partner Capago announced on November 27 that the government portal will undergo ‘major technical maintenance’, rendering all e-forms, appointment scheduling and file-tracking functions inaccessible on Wednesday 3 December (15:30-19:30) and again on Tuesday 9 December (06:00-09:00).
The temporary blackout affects every Algerian applicant – tourists, students and work-permit holders alike – because France requires all visa seekers outside the EU to create an online file before they can submit biometrics. Capago says clients with time-sensitive travel should expect their appointments to be automatically re-scheduled and will receive new time-slots by email or SMS. The company urges travellers to keep those slots, warning that no-shows risk losing their place in the queue at a time of peak end-of-year demand.
![France-Visas portal to go offline twice in December, warns Capago Algeria]()
For global-mobility managers, the key risk is misalignment between project start-dates and the revised appointment calendar. Employers should immediately audit December deployment plans, alert assignees whose biometrics fall within the outage windows, and prepare fallback scenarios such as remote onboarding or delayed start dates. HR teams using third-party immigration providers should insist on written confirmation of the new slot to avoid last-minute surprises at Capago’s Algiers, Oran and Annaba centres.
The maintenance also underscores France’s broader push to digitise 100 % of immigration procedures by the end of 2025, a reform that has already migrated talent-passport renewals and change-of-status filings to the ANEF online portal. While the overhaul promises faster processing in the long run, recent outages – including a four-hour crash during July’s air-traffic-controller strike – show the system is still fragile. Companies are therefore advised to maintain paper copies of critical documents and to pad timelines by at least one week when planning assignments from high-volume consular posts.
Capago’s notice comes amid heightened travel demand: student departures peak in December – January, and Algerian business travellers often combine Paris meetings with year-end shopping trips. Any backlog created by the outage could spill into the first half of the month, so early action and clear employee communications are essential.
The temporary blackout affects every Algerian applicant – tourists, students and work-permit holders alike – because France requires all visa seekers outside the EU to create an online file before they can submit biometrics. Capago says clients with time-sensitive travel should expect their appointments to be automatically re-scheduled and will receive new time-slots by email or SMS. The company urges travellers to keep those slots, warning that no-shows risk losing their place in the queue at a time of peak end-of-year demand.
For global-mobility managers, the key risk is misalignment between project start-dates and the revised appointment calendar. Employers should immediately audit December deployment plans, alert assignees whose biometrics fall within the outage windows, and prepare fallback scenarios such as remote onboarding or delayed start dates. HR teams using third-party immigration providers should insist on written confirmation of the new slot to avoid last-minute surprises at Capago’s Algiers, Oran and Annaba centres.
The maintenance also underscores France’s broader push to digitise 100 % of immigration procedures by the end of 2025, a reform that has already migrated talent-passport renewals and change-of-status filings to the ANEF online portal. While the overhaul promises faster processing in the long run, recent outages – including a four-hour crash during July’s air-traffic-controller strike – show the system is still fragile. Companies are therefore advised to maintain paper copies of critical documents and to pad timelines by at least one week when planning assignments from high-volume consular posts.
Capago’s notice comes amid heightened travel demand: student departures peak in December – January, and Algerian business travellers often combine Paris meetings with year-end shopping trips. Any backlog created by the outage could spill into the first half of the month, so early action and clear employee communications are essential.
