Passengers at Zimbabwe's main airports are reportedly facing major delays after an internet failure took down the systems used to coordinate flights, with staff falling back on manual processes to move people through the terminals. The disruption appears limited to airport systems rather than a wider national outage.
Robert Gabriel Mugabe International Airport in Harare and Victoria Falls Airport are both affected. The cause of the outage has not been established, but reports indicate it may due to a systems issue with Airport Company of Zimbabwe (ACZ).
The account comes from flight attendants and staff on the ground in Zimbabwe. Below is the current arrivals board for Victoria Falls Airport, indicating wide spread delays and disruptions:
What's going wrong
The central problem is coordination. With the systems down, the information that normally flows automatically between check-in, gates, ramp staff and the aircraft has to be passed by hand, and that is where things are breaking.
The flight attendant described one incident in which a passenger in a wheelchair was loaded onto the wrong flight after the technology used to coordinate boarding went down.
Without working departure control, check-in, bag tagging and boarding pass issuance all revert to paper. That is slow on its own, and the delay compounds through the day as each departure inherits the backlog from the one before it.
What we don't know yet
The cause of the outage is unknown, as is the expected restoration status. It is also unclear whether flights are being cancelled as well as delayed, whether arrivals are affected alongside departures, and whether airports beyond Harare and Victoria Falls are involved.
The Civil Aviation Authority of Zimbabwe has not issued a statement at the time of writing.
If you're flying today
Check your flight status directly with your airline before travelling to the airport, and allow substantially more time than usual. Manual processing hits checked baggage hardest, so travelling with carry-on only will move you through faster.
If you are travelling with someone who needs assistance, confirm their flight and gate directly with a staff member rather than relying on the boarding process to route them correctly.