People queueing outside the international terminal at Auckland Airport as an external network outage causes major delays at the check-in counters Photo: RNZ / Marika Khabazi
Auckland Airport says Wednesday morning's network outage, which led to a breakdown in the international check-in system, was caused by a fault in a communication switch.
Eighteen international departures were delayed, with massive queues at check-in stretching out of the door, leaving hundreds of passengers left waiting at the terminal.
The airport's chief operations officer, Chloe Surridge, told Checkpoint the communication switch that broke was in the domain of one of the airport's fibre network providers.
That cut off access to businesses, including a global airline technology provider, which the international check-in system relied on, she said.
The incident comes after 23 system outages in the airport's baggage system in recent weeks.
Auckland Airport speaks on network outage
"As you know, we're building a new baggage system, and that will be part of the integrated terminal development programme. In order for us to have that new baggage system, we also have to upgrade the old one, which is 30 years old," she said.
She said the network issues today were unrelated to the new baggage system being implemented.
"They are completely separate. But that being said, yes, completely acknowledge there have been periods of disruption as that old system has been upgraded."
O'Brien said any network outage was concerning as airlines planned for extra passengers - and baggage - over summer, but any planned upgrades were strategically mapped out ahead of time.
"It's a bit like changing the wheel on your car while the car is going.
"We have a brownout period over Christmas where we don't do any work at all, but these upgrades have been happening in stages, because you can't do everything at once, over the last 18 months, and will continue to do so through until next year."
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