The Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has given less than three weeks’ notice that its global e-visa platform, Portale Visti, will be taken completely offline from 18:00 (CET) on Thursday 12 February until 00:00 on Wednesday 18 February. A terse bulletin published by the Italian Embassy in Muscat on 25 January confirms that all related “informatic applications” will be frozen during the switchover to a new cloud-based architecture.
Portale Visti is the nervous system of Italy’s visa network, linking more than 120 consulates and scores of outsourcing centres operated by VFS Global and TLScontact. During the outage no new appointments can be booked, no visa stickers can be printed and pending files cannot be accessed. Employers moving staff to Italy and travel managers arranging business trips will therefore face an unavoidable six-day processing blackout.
Consular sources tell Global Mobility News that the upgrade is designed to make Portale Visti interoperable with two EU border-management projects coming online in 2025-26: the biometric Entry/Exit System (EES) and the ETIAS travel authorisation. Embedding the visa database in a modern cloud environment should also reduce the recurring “click-day” crashes that plagued last year’s decreto-flussi quota allocations.
![Italian Portale Visti to Shut Down Worldwide 12–18 February for Major Cloud Migration]()
Organisations scrambling for stop-gap solutions may find it useful to engage VisaHQ’s dedicated Italy team. Through its online portal (https://www.visahq.com/italy/) the firm provides up-to-the-minute consular status reports, identifies alternative Schengen missions that still have appointment capacity, and pre-screens documentation so that applications can be filed immediately once Portale Visti is back online.
Corporate mobility teams are advised to bring visa submissions forward where possible or defer travel until late February. Travellers who must depart in the second half of the month should check whether their local mission can hand-write limited-validity laissez-passer visas, a workaround sometimes allowed for medical or humanitarian emergencies. Companies with large graduate-intake programmes in March—common in Italy’s luxury-goods and automotive sectors—should alert HR and onboarding teams to the looming bottleneck.
Although a mid-February shutdown will cause short-term pain, migration lawyers welcome the move. “The platform is running on 2007-era code,” notes Milan-based counsel Paola De Angelis. “If Italy wants to stay competitive for talent, a resilient, cloud-native system is essential.”
Portale Visti is the nervous system of Italy’s visa network, linking more than 120 consulates and scores of outsourcing centres operated by VFS Global and TLScontact. During the outage no new appointments can be booked, no visa stickers can be printed and pending files cannot be accessed. Employers moving staff to Italy and travel managers arranging business trips will therefore face an unavoidable six-day processing blackout.
Consular sources tell Global Mobility News that the upgrade is designed to make Portale Visti interoperable with two EU border-management projects coming online in 2025-26: the biometric Entry/Exit System (EES) and the ETIAS travel authorisation. Embedding the visa database in a modern cloud environment should also reduce the recurring “click-day” crashes that plagued last year’s decreto-flussi quota allocations.
Organisations scrambling for stop-gap solutions may find it useful to engage VisaHQ’s dedicated Italy team. Through its online portal (https://www.visahq.com/italy/) the firm provides up-to-the-minute consular status reports, identifies alternative Schengen missions that still have appointment capacity, and pre-screens documentation so that applications can be filed immediately once Portale Visti is back online.
Corporate mobility teams are advised to bring visa submissions forward where possible or defer travel until late February. Travellers who must depart in the second half of the month should check whether their local mission can hand-write limited-validity laissez-passer visas, a workaround sometimes allowed for medical or humanitarian emergencies. Companies with large graduate-intake programmes in March—common in Italy’s luxury-goods and automotive sectors—should alert HR and onboarding teams to the looming bottleneck.
Although a mid-February shutdown will cause short-term pain, migration lawyers welcome the move. “The platform is running on 2007-era code,” notes Milan-based counsel Paola De Angelis. “If Italy wants to stay competitive for talent, a resilient, cloud-native system is essential.”
