The digital system used to issue Police Clearance Certificates is working again after a two-day failure, and applications can once more be submitted through the normal online procedure, Sri Lanka Police announced on Saturday.
The system, run by the Police Clearance Division on the 17th floor of the Suhurupaya Building in Battaramulla, became inactive at about 12.50 p.m. on August 20. Police notified the Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA), and the Police Media Division said the measures needed to bring the system back were then taken.
What applicants must do now
Anyone who applied during the outage using the temporary email address, [email protected], must resubmit through the regular online system. Those applicants are also required to make the relevant payments as usual — the email route had allowed submission with no payment upfront.
Police asked media organisations to publicise the announcement so that affected applicants are informed.
A three-day disruption
The failure halted the whole chain rather than a single step in it. The same database handles the submission of applications, the requesting of the background reports each one needs from police stations, and the printing of the certificates themselves.
Police initially told the public to stop applying altogether on Friday morning, then reversed that instruction later the same day by opening the email workaround. Saturday’s announcement closes the episode about 54 hours after the system went down.
Why it matters
Police Clearance Certificates are among the most heavily used documents Sri Lanka Police issues to the public, required for visa applications, migration and overseas employment placements. The Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment reported record monthly departures in July, and several destination countries — including the United Arab Emirates, which made police clearance mandatory for Sri Lankan visa applicants — treat the certificate as a condition of entry or of a work permit.
It was the second failure of a public-facing government document system this month. Passport issuance at the Department of Immigration and Emigration was halted by a computer failure on August 11, though that outage was resolved within about an hour.
