Longer wait times at Indonesia airports due to systems outage; travellers advised to arrive early

JAKARTA - Passengers departing from airports in Indonesia have been advised to arrive early as an ongoing systems disruption to several government services slowed down immigration clearance.

On June 20, the authorities said a national data-related issue was causing disruptions at its airports, while passengers reported hours-long queues as officers manually took down their details on pen and paper.

The directorate-general of immigration said in an Instagram post at about 6pm on June 20 that there was a temporary disruption to Indonesia’s National Data Centre server.

The server, which is managed by Indonesia’s Ministry of Communication and Informatics, has a database of information that government services use to function.

Passengers were advised to arrive earlier at the airports in anticipation of the slowdown in inspection processes.

The post apologised for the inconvenience.

Director-general of immigration Silmy Karim said that travellers can still pass through Indonesia’s borders without any issue, but that the process will take longer as immigration inspections have to be done manually.

Speaking to the Kompas.com news site on June 20, Mr Silmy said the disruption will continue until the data servers recover, and that efforts are being made to use back-up data to restore some services. He did not give a timeline for this.

On the same day, Indonesian Minister of Communication and Information Budi Arie Setiadi told reporters that the process of repairing the public services was being carried out in stages.

No concrete details, including the cause for the disruption, have been given so far.

Photos on the social media of Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport on June 20 showed long queues of people waiting to clear immigration, with more than 50 people in a line that was snaking outside the departure hall and into the public area.

X user Bimo Anindya, one of the passengers affected, uploaded photos of his experience arriving in Jakarta on June 20.

He said the disruptions started from around 4pm, and that he was still stuck in line to clear immigration after more than 2½ hours.

Mr Bimo added that the queues for both local and foreign arrivals had converged, and that all checks were being done manually.

When The Straits Times visited the airport on the morning of June 21, the situation appeared to have improved, with most passengers saying they did not have to wait significantly longer to clear immigration.

An immigration officer, who did not want to be named, said: “There is still a queue, but the checks ran quite smoothly. It is not so crowded at this hour.”

Mr Muhammad Syarif, 54, a personnel trainer in an automotive company who was flying to Bangkok, told ST that an officer at the immigration desk took his data manually with pen and paper when he checked in. “It took 15 minutes for me to queue, and the data recording lasted less than five minutes,” he said.

Indonesian state-owned airport operator Angkasa Pura Indonesia said in a statement on June 21 that as of 1pm, immigration clearance was still being done manually.

The firm’s corporate secretary Rahadian Yogisworo said that additional manpower had been activated to ensure the smooth running of its processes.

“We appeal to airlines serving international flights to convey to prospective passengers that they should arrive earlier than the scheduled departure to minimise queues during the immigration process,” he said.

The latest disruption comes a year after a leak from the National Data Centre caused the private information of some 34 million Indonesian passports to be sold online.