From 8:30 p.m. AEDT this evening (28 November) until midday tomorrow, ImmiAccount, eLodgement, VEVO, eMedical, LEGENDcom and even the APEC Business Travel Card portal will be offline for scheduled maintenance—Australia’s most comprehensive immigration IT shutdown since 2023. The Australian Border Force (ABF) confirmed the outage in a late-night industry bulletin and has advised anyone whose visa expires today to lodge before the switch-off.
The timing is awkward: the last business day of the month is when corporate mobility teams normally rush through renewals and nominations to keep expatriate staff off bridging visas that restrict work rights and lose Medicare access. Big Four advisory firms have already sent all-staff alerts telling partners to submit applications by 4 p.m. and to print VEVO records for travellers departing over the weekend.
![15-hour blackout of Australia’s online visa systems starts tonight]()
During the 15-hour window employers cannot run VEVO right-to-work checks, education providers cannot upload Confirmation of Enrolment data and travellers cannot pay for or lodge visa or citizenship applications online. Freight forwarders using the Australian Trusted Trader interface and customs brokers reliant on e-medical links for temporary-work applicants will also face manual processing delays.
ABF says the upgrade will deliver “critical security patches and capacity boosts” ahead of the January student-visa surge and the Christmas travel peak, when daily VEVO look-ups typically double. But mobility managers recall the 2023 refresh that over-ran by eleven hours and generated a backlog of 35,000 un-actioned applications. Contingency plans therefore include holding boarding-gate copies of visas and shifting onboarding dates for new hires arriving in early December.
The timing is awkward: the last business day of the month is when corporate mobility teams normally rush through renewals and nominations to keep expatriate staff off bridging visas that restrict work rights and lose Medicare access. Big Four advisory firms have already sent all-staff alerts telling partners to submit applications by 4 p.m. and to print VEVO records for travellers departing over the weekend.
During the 15-hour window employers cannot run VEVO right-to-work checks, education providers cannot upload Confirmation of Enrolment data and travellers cannot pay for or lodge visa or citizenship applications online. Freight forwarders using the Australian Trusted Trader interface and customs brokers reliant on e-medical links for temporary-work applicants will also face manual processing delays.
ABF says the upgrade will deliver “critical security patches and capacity boosts” ahead of the January student-visa surge and the Christmas travel peak, when daily VEVO look-ups typically double. But mobility managers recall the 2023 refresh that over-ran by eleven hours and generated a backlog of 35,000 un-actioned applications. Contingency plans therefore include holding boarding-gate copies of visas and shifting onboarding dates for new hires arriving in early December.
