The Department of Home Affairs took multiple online visa-processing platforms offline from 20:00 AEST Friday 25 September until 17:00 Saturday 26 September for ‘urgent infrastructure maintenance’, according to a notice posted on its media archive. The outage affected ImmiAccount lodgements, SkillSelect Expressions of Interest (EOI) submissions and VEVO status checks, effectively halting new visa filings and making it impossible for airlines to verify work-right status in real time. Businesses with time-critical applications—particularly labour-agreement nominations and subclass 400 Temporary Work (Short Stay Specialist) visas—scrambled to submit paperwork before the blackout. Several Big Four consulting firms confirmed to Global Mobility News that their legal teams instituted ‘paper lodgement’ contingencies for senior-executive deployments scheduled to start this week. The shutdown also created check-in bottlenecks at airports because Advance Passenger Processing feeds could not retrieve VEVO records for some passengers holding electronic visas. Airlines reverted to manual document inspection, slowing boarding and increasing the risk of inadvertent carriage refusals. Home Affairs says the maintenance was necessary to patch a critical vulnerability identified by the Australian Signals Directorate. Although systems are now back online, officials concede more rolling outages are likely before the end of the year as the department migrates to a new cloud platform. Mobility managers should diarise the outages, track any downstream costs and consider requesting ‘service-level breach’ credits where visa-processing SLAs are written into relocation contracts. They should also keep scanned copies of visa grant notices on file for each traveller in case further VEVO interruptions occur.
