The Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF) has confirmed that its Post Entry Biosecurity System (PEBS)—the mandatory online portal for importing pets, cuttings and high-risk plant material—will be offline from 23:00 AEDT on 27 January until 00:00 AEDT on 28 January due to infrastructure maintenance. Although the window is just 60 minutes, freight forwarders warn that any submissions started but not completed before shutdown will auto-expire, forcing re-lodgement and potentially delaying quarantine bookings by up to three days during the busy post-holiday relocation season.
PEBS integrates with the Australian Border Force’s Integrated Cargo System to generate permit numbers that airlines must sight before loading live animals or plant consignments. Mobility providers relocating executives with pets should ensure veterinary health certificates and airline reservation references are uploaded well before the blackout, or hold shipments until the portal re-opens.
![Quarantine IT Outage Halts Pet and Plant Imports for One Hour Overnight]()
For companies that would rather outsource the red tape, VisaHQ’s Australia platform (https://www.visahq.com/australia/) offers tailored assistance with quarantine permits, pet import documentation and associated visas. Its real-time tracking and expert review can help prevent the sort of last-minute errors that lead to PEBS re-lodgement and shipping delays.
DAFF says contingency paper forms will be accepted at Melbourne and Sydney quarantine facilities for genuinely urgent animal welfare cases, but these must be pre-notified by phone to the Biosecurity Operations Centre. The department will also issue an automatic extension of application deadlines set to lapse during the outage, preventing applicants from breaching statutory time limits.
The outage highlights continued dependency on legacy quarantine ICT even as government pilots fully digital border declarations for passengers. A tender for a PEBS replacement platform was shelved last year after budget overruns; officials now say an upgrade path will be detailed in the May 2026 federal budget.
PEBS integrates with the Australian Border Force’s Integrated Cargo System to generate permit numbers that airlines must sight before loading live animals or plant consignments. Mobility providers relocating executives with pets should ensure veterinary health certificates and airline reservation references are uploaded well before the blackout, or hold shipments until the portal re-opens.
For companies that would rather outsource the red tape, VisaHQ’s Australia platform (https://www.visahq.com/australia/) offers tailored assistance with quarantine permits, pet import documentation and associated visas. Its real-time tracking and expert review can help prevent the sort of last-minute errors that lead to PEBS re-lodgement and shipping delays.
DAFF says contingency paper forms will be accepted at Melbourne and Sydney quarantine facilities for genuinely urgent animal welfare cases, but these must be pre-notified by phone to the Biosecurity Operations Centre. The department will also issue an automatic extension of application deadlines set to lapse during the outage, preventing applicants from breaching statutory time limits.
The outage highlights continued dependency on legacy quarantine ICT even as government pilots fully digital border declarations for passengers. A tender for a PEBS replacement platform was shelved last year after budget overruns; officials now say an upgrade path will be detailed in the May 2026 federal budget.
