Macau | Glitch leads to chaos at border

On Saturday a computer failure in the checking system at the border gate sparked chaos that lasted for approximately two hours. Traffic stalled and a large group of people remained outside the departure hall.
The incident took place at around 5.18 p.m. and lasted until 7.15 p.m. Police officers quickly arranged a barricade around the departure hall outside, where several long, disorganized queues of people waiting to cross the border were already being formed. Meanwhile on the mainland side, the Gongbei police also had to control groups of people waiting to enter Macau.
Ng Kam Va, deputy director of the Public Security Police Force (PSP), informed the media that the problems first occurred with passports and travel documents, while the Macau identity card system continued to work normally for a brief period of time before it too faced similar difficulties. According to the PSP, the same computer system failure struck the automatic checkpoints of all local border gates at the same time in the afternoon.
Ngou Kuok Lim, head of the technical department of the PSP, claimed that the backup program also failed to work correctly after it had been launched following the initial failure. The PSP apologized to the public and confirmed that the failures were not due to interference by hackers. Staff reporter