Cambodia eVisa System Down — What Australians Should Do (2026)

When Phnom Penh-end outages typically happen

Cambodian eVisa portal outages are not random — they cluster in three predictable windows. Knowing the patterns means you can plan your submission to avoid the worst moments, and it means a portal that is down at 11pm Sydney on a Sunday is almost certainly going to be back up by 1am Sydney time without you doing anything.

First — the KH-evening window. Phnom Penh business hours run roughly 8am-5pm Khmer time, which is 11am-8pm Sydney time. The portal gets a lot less attention from operations staff outside those hours, and any minor glitch that would be caught and fixed inside Khmer business hours can sit unresolved for an hour or two in the KH-evening. KH-evening is around 9pm-1am Sydney time, which is exactly when many Aussies first sit down to do the visa after the kids are in bed.

Second — weekends. Cambodian Immigration's eVisa unit does not process files on Saturday or Sunday, and the portal infrastructure receives lighter monitoring on weekends too. Most weekend outages are short, but the response time on anything genuinely broken can stretch into Monday morning Khmer time, which is Monday afternoon Sydney time.

Third — the first weekend of each month. Scheduled maintenance runs in the first Sunday-evening Khmer time window of every month, which lands on Monday morning Sydney time. This is the only outage that is genuinely planned and announced — but the announcement is in Khmer on the eVisa portal banner and most Aussies miss it. Plan around it by submitting earlier in the week or earlier in the day.

How to confirm the portal is actually down (and not just your end)

Before you assume the portal is broken globally, do the 60-second outage diagnostic. It is short, it rules out the most common false positives, and it saves the rest of your evening.

• Step 1: try the page on a second device — open it on your phone using mobile data (with wifi off). If it loads on the phone, the issue is your home wifi or laptop, not the portal.
• Step 2: try a different browser or incognito window on the same device. Browser cache and extensions cause a surprising share of 'system down' reports — incognito clears both.
• Step 3: check downdetector for the Cambodian government domains, or check our public status page. If it shows widespread reports, the outage is real and broader than you.
• Step 4: ask in a relevant Aussie travel Facebook group. If three other people in the comments are also seeing it, it is a portal outage. If nobody else is having an issue, it is something on your end.
• Step 5: through us, reply on your confirmation thread or contact support — Aussie-timezone monitoring catches most things within 90 seconds and can tell you immediately whether it is a portal-side or our-side issue.

The reason the diagnostic matters is that 'wait it out' and 'fix your end' are very different things, and doing the wrong one for an hour is what turns a small annoyance into a bad evening. If your laptop is the problem and you wait two hours, the portal was up the whole time. If the portal is the problem and you spend two hours reinstalling Chrome, nothing improves. The Cambodia eVisa rush options and myths piece for Australians covers what a real same-day visa actually looks like if you do hit a portal problem at a tight moment.

If your flight is 48 hours out and the portal is still unreachable

This is the situation everyone is really worried about — the portal is down, the clock is ticking, and the flight is locked in. The honest answer is that genuine 48-hour portal outages that prevent eVisa submission are rare; most Aussies who think they are in this situation are actually in the 'wait 30 more minutes' situation. But if you have done the diagnostic and the portal is genuinely unreachable from multiple networks and downdetector confirms it, there is a fallback path that is built precisely for this scenario.

Cambodia maintains a visa-on-arrival counter at three international airports — KTI (Phnom Penh, Techo International, which replaced PNH on 9 September 2025), SAI (Siem Reap), and KOS (Sihanoukville). The visa-on-arrival is $30 USD (~$45 AUD) in cash at the counter, processed in the immigration hall after you land, valid for 30 days single entry. It is not available at any land border (and in 2026 all 7 Thailand-Cambodia land borders are closed anyway), and it is not available at smaller airports.

The visa-on-arrival is a genuine fallback rather than a primary route. Cash USD only — Aussie debit cards do not work at the counter. The queues can run 30-90 minutes after a wide-body lands. Australian airlines (Qantas, Singapore Airlines) sometimes ask for proof of onward travel and proof of eligibility for visa-on-arrival at the Sydney or Melbourne gate before letting you board, so carry the printed flight return and a screenshot of the Cambodian government VOA eligibility page on your phone.

The Cambodia visa-on-arrival 2026 guide for Australians has the full counter walkthrough for KTI, SAI, and KOS — what to carry, how much USD cash to bring, how the photo step works at the counter, and what the typical immigration-hall wait looks like.

When our checkout is the unreachable side

Occasionally — usually after a deployment or a third-party-service hiccup — our checkout is the side that is unreachable rather than the Cambodian portal. We monitor for this aggressively. The Sydney reliability team gets a Slack alert inside 90 seconds of any checkout error rate above baseline, on-call rotates by Aussie business hours, and an outage on our end usually has a status banner up on the apply page within 5 minutes telling you exactly what is happening.

If our checkout is down and you have already filled in the form, the safest move is to close the browser tab without paying and come back in 10 minutes — your form details auto-save and you will not lose them. Do not open a second tab and try to submit again from there. If our checkout is fully unreachable for more than 30 minutes, reply on the confirmation email if you got one or contact support — Aussie-timezone responders can either confirm the issue is resolved or queue your application manually.

Across the entire stack — portal up, checkout up, card going through — the typical submission completes in under 4 minutes. If you are past 10 minutes and nothing has loaded, that is the right moment to stop refreshing and start diagnosing.

Putting it together for Aussie travellers

A Cambodia eVisa portal that will not load is almost never an emergency. The Phnom Penh-side outage windows are predictable, most last under 90 minutes, the bank-and-network failure modes are quick to diagnose, and the visa-on-arrival fallback at KTI, SAI, and KOS exists precisely for the rare cases where you genuinely cannot get the eVisa submitted before flight. The single trap to avoid is the double-submission — wait it out, diagnose first, fix the right thing once. The Do Australians need a visa for Cambodia explainer covers the upstream eligibility picture if you want the wider context.

Next steps and related reading for Australians: apply for your Cambodia eVisa when you are ready to lodge, bookmark our Cambodia visa hub for Australian citizens as the single canonical reference, skim the FAQ on Cambodia visa eligibility for quick answers, and use our glossary of Cambodia visa terms to decode any acronym in this guide.