Barely hours after the Migration and Asylum Pact went live, the upgraded Eurodac database crashed during a scheduled update, leaving border posts across Europe unable to upload fingerprints and photographs for several hours on 12 June. Dutch immigration authorities first reported the outage, which Brussels quickly confirmed affected at least nine member states, including Belgium’s main registration centres at Brussels Airport and the Bordet Reception Hub. Officials in the Belgian Immigration Office said fallback procedures—paper files and secure USB data transfers—were activated at 03:15, allowing arrivals to be released from holding rooms rather than kept overnight. Nevertheless, some 380 people who landed on early-morning long-haul flights were bussed to temporary accommodation in Molenbeek because digital checks could not be completed within the statutory four-hour window. The incident highlights the scale-up risks of the EU’s new biometric infrastructure.
![Eurodac database suffers launch-day glitch, delaying Belgian asylum registrations]()
In the meantime, organisations looking for certainty have other options. VisaHQ’s dedicated Belgium portal (https://www.visahq.com/belgium/) monitors government system outages in real time and can assemble compliant work-permit or visa files in advance, book emergency appointments, and arrange courier hand-overs, helping employers and travellers avoid bottlenecks when official databases go offline.
Eurodac version 2.0 now stores multi-modal biometrics, high-resolution travel-document scans and links to criminal-record databases; the volume of data processed per query has quadrupled. The European Commission blamed the glitch on a “configuration conflict” and said service was fully restored by 11:30 CET. For Belgian employers filing fast-track work-permit requests, the outage is a warning that initial teething problems could ripple into longer lead times. Mobility teams are advised to build at least an extra week into deployment calendars until Eurodac stabilises and integration with the new Entry/Exit System is proved reliable.
In the meantime, organisations looking for certainty have other options. VisaHQ’s dedicated Belgium portal (https://www.visahq.com/belgium/) monitors government system outages in real time and can assemble compliant work-permit or visa files in advance, book emergency appointments, and arrange courier hand-overs, helping employers and travellers avoid bottlenecks when official databases go offline.
Eurodac version 2.0 now stores multi-modal biometrics, high-resolution travel-document scans and links to criminal-record databases; the volume of data processed per query has quadrupled. The European Commission blamed the glitch on a “configuration conflict” and said service was fully restored by 11:30 CET. For Belgian employers filing fast-track work-permit requests, the outage is a warning that initial teething problems could ripple into longer lead times. Mobility teams are advised to build at least an extra week into deployment calendars until Eurodac stabilises and integration with the new Entry/Exit System is proved reliable.
