Passenger verification system outage disrupts airports for two hours; 44 flights delayed

[Financial News] An outage in the Ministry of Justice’s Passenger Pre-Verification System (IPC) on the 3rd disrupted airport operations for about two hours, including causing flight delays at airports nationwide.
According to the Ministry of Justice and Incheon International Airport, a problem with the ministry’s IPC at around 6:05 a.m. that day caused airline check-in counters linked to the system at airports nationwide to stop operating.
IPC receives passenger information from airlines and checks in real time whether people scheduled to board include individuals posing a security risk, such as international terrorists. It then indicates whether they are permitted to depart, allowing boarding to be blocked in advance.
At around 6:15 a.m., 15 minutes after receiving a report from the Incheon Airport Immigration and Foreigners Office that airlines were unable to receive passenger information, the Ministry of Justice instructed airlines to switch to forced (manual) ticketing.
Passenger information was transmitted to airline systems at around 7:25 a.m., and the Ministry of Justice finally confirmed at around 8:25 a.m.—two hours and 20 minutes after the outage began—that the airlines’ communication response speed had returned to normal.
Some congestion arose as airline staff checked passenger information, and as a result, 44 of the 201 flights scheduled to depart from airports nationwide were delayed. Thirty-six flights were delayed by 30 minutes to one hour, and eight by one hour or more.
The Ministry of Justice believes the system was overloaded when passenger information that had not been entered for around two hours was updated all at once while the Incheon Airport office replaced outdated storage equipment early that morning.
A Ministry of Justice official explained that flight delays were within the normal range and that all passengers completed departure immigration screening before their scheduled departure times. The official added that the ministry would thoroughly analyze the cause of the outage and make every effort to draw up advance plans to ensure that future equipment replacement work does not affect the system.
Earlier, on the 30th of last month, a failure in some airlines’ check-in systems at Incheon Airport halted check-in for about 13 hours and delayed flights, inconveniencing around 1,200 passengers.

[email protected] Lee Hwan-joo Reporter