When the Kiosks Took a Break: Changi’s Morning of Manual Check-In

Self-service kiosks have become so normal at big airports that most travellers barely notice them, until they stop working. That is what happened at Singapore’s Changi Airport on the morning of November 2.

From around 8:30 a.m., some kiosks in all four terminals could no longer process self check-in or print boarding passes. Changi Airport Group put the cause down to a global disruption in Advance Passenger Processing systems, the checks that send passenger details to border authorities before a flight, and said other airports were similarly affected. Some airlines switched to manual check-in, ground staff stepped in to help passengers, and processes for all affected airlines were back to normal at around 11 a.m., after at least two and a half hours. Even so, a few airlines’ kiosks were still seen out of service around midday.

At Terminal 4, screens at some airline rows simply displayed the words “taking a break”, and at Terminal 3 passengers for a late-morning flight to Jakarta were ushered into a separate queue for an accelerated bag check.

For passengers, the practical lesson is an old one: on a day when the screens go dark, arriving with time to spare and having a booking reference ready still makes the difference between a calm queue and a sprint to the gate. For airports, it is a reminder that a smooth terminal depends on systems far beyond its own walls.