Health code down twice following new rule on residential addresses

The Macau Health Code system was out of order twice yesterday due to the Health Bureau (SSM) requiring all users to input their residential addresses manually.

The system was down twice yesterday – at about 7:35 a.m. and 2:45 p.m. – causing disruption to the service.

The outages, especially the morning one, disrupted many people’s movements, as numerous schools and private and public entities are strictly complying with the SSM’s health code inspection and footprint code scanning recommendations.

The glitch also led to a jammed immigration at the Border Gate and Hengqin checkpoints.

Local police had to increase manpower to control the crowds and inspect health codes of travelers that were generated in Guangdong.

The Public Security Police Force (PSP) stated that it took about an hour for travelers to cross the border.

In the statement issued following the afternoon outage, the SSM noted that the afternoon outage occurred for about half-an-hour.

Meanwhile, the option to “Give consent to the Health Bureau to retrieve personal information from the Identification Services Bureau if registered address falls into the affected area(s)” was automatically removed from the Macau Health Code app yesterday.

Instead, members of the public must complete their up-to-date residential address in Macau to generate a health code in the app.

During the past outbreak, the SSM identified that many health codes had been mistakenly converted to the wrong colors due to users forgetting to update their residential addresses at the Identification Services Bureau (DSI).

As such, when the SSM retrieved the addresses from the DSI, many people were identified as residing at the wrong address.

However, the problem has not been fully addressed, as many people had their addresses inputted correctly but still were given their codes in the wrong color.

Those who fail to update their address on their designated date will not be able to generate a health code.