The Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF) restored its Biosecurity Portal at 09:15 AEDT on 18 December after an eight-hour overnight outage that halted electronic lodgement of import declarations. Notice 414-2025 confirms normal service has resumed, averting the need for manual fallback procedures at air-cargo terminals.
Although passenger movements were largely unaffected, the disruption created delays for ‘accompanied personal effects’ inspections and some live-animal imports arriving on overnight freighters. Logistics companies warned that extended downtime could have snarled Christmas retail supply chains, which rely on just-in-time clearance of perishables and electronics.
Companies arranging urgent staff moves into Australia may also benefit from specialised visa support. VisaHQ’s Australian desk (https://www.visahq.com/australia/) offers end-to-end assistance with work, temporary activity and dependent visas, ensuring immigration paperwork is finalised before shipments hit customs. Coordinating biosecurity declarations and visa timelines through a single platform can reduce storage costs and prevent handover delays.
![Biosecurity IT outage resolved, clearing import bottleneck at Australian ports]()
Global mobility professionals should note that the Biosecurity Portal also handles declarations for unaccompanied baggage consignments—a common option for relocating employees. Any shipments lodged during the outage will be timestamp-processed, so delivery windows may slip by 24-48 hours.
DAFF urged industry participants to subscribe to its new ‘Import System Notifications’ list before legacy alerts are switched off on 1 February 2026. Failure to do so could leave relocation providers unaware of future system outages, raising the risk of demurrage charges or delayed household-goods deliveries.
The incident is the third unplanned disruption this month, sparking calls from Freight & Trade Alliance for redundant cloud hosting. DAFF says a post-incident review is under way.
Although passenger movements were largely unaffected, the disruption created delays for ‘accompanied personal effects’ inspections and some live-animal imports arriving on overnight freighters. Logistics companies warned that extended downtime could have snarled Christmas retail supply chains, which rely on just-in-time clearance of perishables and electronics.
Companies arranging urgent staff moves into Australia may also benefit from specialised visa support. VisaHQ’s Australian desk (https://www.visahq.com/australia/) offers end-to-end assistance with work, temporary activity and dependent visas, ensuring immigration paperwork is finalised before shipments hit customs. Coordinating biosecurity declarations and visa timelines through a single platform can reduce storage costs and prevent handover delays.
Global mobility professionals should note that the Biosecurity Portal also handles declarations for unaccompanied baggage consignments—a common option for relocating employees. Any shipments lodged during the outage will be timestamp-processed, so delivery windows may slip by 24-48 hours.
DAFF urged industry participants to subscribe to its new ‘Import System Notifications’ list before legacy alerts are switched off on 1 February 2026. Failure to do so could leave relocation providers unaware of future system outages, raising the risk of demurrage charges or delayed household-goods deliveries.
The incident is the third unplanned disruption this month, sparking calls from Freight & Trade Alliance for redundant cloud hosting. DAFF says a post-incident review is under way.
