FIA immigration system outage disrupts clearance at airports nationwide
Airport officials say the failure hit counters across the country at once and took about an hour to restore, delaying international departures.
Immigration clearance was suspended at Pakistan's airports for around an hour on Tuesday after the Federal Investigation Agency's immigration system failed, leaving passengers queued at counters and delaying international departures, airport officials said.
According to officials at Karachi's Jinnah International Airport, the immigration process was halted after the FIA system suffered a technical failure, and the same fault was reported at airports across the country at the same time. The outage affected passengers travelling on international flights, who could not complete departure formalities while counters remained unable to process them.
Minute Mirror reported that the system began recovering gradually after roughly an hour, allowing immigration staff to resume processing and passengers to proceed with the required formalities. TechJuice, filing earlier in the day, reported that the FIA system was not working at any airport in the country at that point and that no timeline had been given for restoring it. TechJuice also reported that the failure began at Jinnah International Airport.
TechJuice reported that queues grew steadily in immigration areas as counters could not process passengers, and that the suspension caused significant delays for both departing and arriving travellers. Minute Mirror reported that the disruption also affected the departure schedule of international flights.
The FIA did not disclose the reasons behind the failure despite being contacted for comment, Minute Mirror reported, leaving the cause of the nationwide outage unclear. Details of what measures were being taken to prevent a repeat were also not immediately available.
Both outlets reported that the same system had failed at Jinnah International Airport about two weeks earlier. Sources quoted by TechJuice said the recurrence had drawn attention to the reliability of the immigration system, which processes every passenger departing from or arriving on an international flight.
The FIA has not issued a public statement on Tuesday's outage.
Information ministry blames Kabul inaction for strained Pakistan-Afghanistan ties
The ministry rejected a Taliban spokesperson's account of the dispute, saying cross-border militancy remains the biggest obstacle to normal relations between the neighbours.
Tarar proposes national council on cyber security and digital literacy
The information minister used the PTA's Cyber Security Awareness Week to float a coordinating body and to call for digital literacy in school curricula.
Health minister says barcode scan will flag fake medicines from November
Mustafa Kamal told the National Assembly that hospitals will also have to buy all vaccines from Pakistan's own funds by 2030, at a cost of about $1.2 billion.
Fakhar Zaman hits century and passes 4,000 ODI runs
The Pakistan batter reached 4,000 one-day international runs in his 97th ODI and became the 16th from his country to pass the mark.