Sometimes we all need a reminder that human civilisation hangs on a delicate technological thread, and that we are at most about three simultaneous system failures away from cracking each other’s heads open and feasting on the goo inside. Well, here’s today’s example: passport machines have carked it at international airports around Australia, causing massive delays and pissing everyone off.
The passport control machine issue was caused by an Australian Border Force system outage, affecting Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane international airports.
@SydneyAirport is an international embarrassment. pic.twitter.com/GBisNglACE
— 4d5a (@4d5a_etc) April 28, 2019
https://twitter.com/jwpm1977/status/1122618163642785792
A spokesperson for the Brisbane Airport Corporation told the Sydney Morning Herald that the SmartGate passport machines were experiencing issues at around 6am.
“The ABF smart gates were in and out and they were doing manual processing at the international terminal,” she said.
“We got staff in pretty quickly to manually process people.”
An ABF spokesperson said the agency was working with the Department of Home Affairs to sort out the IT issues and alleviate the delays.
Ultimately, we are all obedient servants of the technological security apparatus. Our only way of fighting back, sadly, is tweeting about airport delays.
