Brazil’s Ministry of Management and Innovation (MGI) confirmed on Thursday, 22 October 2026, that it has ordered all federal agencies to disable externally accessible systems written in PHP after a critical zero-day vulnerability was disclosed worldwide. Among the applications pulled offline is the Sistema Eletrônico de Informações (SEI), the government’s ubiquitous workflow platform used by the Ministry of Justice, Federal Police and Itamaraty to process immigration petitions, residence-permit renewals and corporate sponsorship requests. According to the MGI’s press note, access was blocked at 18:00 BRT on 22 October and will remain suspended until at least 08:00 on Monday, 26 October, while servers are patched and security tests completed. During the outage, agencies have been instructed to accept only emergency submissions via GOV.BR-authenticated email, with paper filings discouraged because of election-period staffing constraints. For employers and relocation providers the unexpected downtime means delays in issuing work permits, registering inbound assignees and obtaining police‐clearance certificates—processes that are all routed through SEI. Cases already in queue will be paused automatically, and statutory decision deadlines are expected to be extended once systems return. Applicants with tight mobilisation schedules should adjust travel plans or consider entering on visitor status and converting in country, where eligible. The incident highlights the dependency of Brazil’s mobility framework on a single digital backbone: more than 80 federal entities, including Receita Federal and ANTT, rely on SEI for document routing. Immigration practitioners have long urged the creation of a dedicated e-immigration portal insulated from broader government IT shocks; the current disruption is likely to add political weight to that proposal. MGI says no data breach was detected and that the measure is purely preventive. Still, companies should monitor agency communiqués and build extra lead-time into Brazilian immigration timelines over the coming weeks as backlogs clear.
