Daily Digest, August 28, 2026: The Cancelled Interviews Are Coming Back — Nine Days to a Month Later

Last week we wrote about interviews being cancelled at posts on four continents in the same few days, and had to correct ourselves once on the reason. The question everyone actually had was the one we could not answer then: when do you get a new date?

The first replacement appointments have now come through. We are tracking seventeen reports, twelve of them cancellations. Three of those twelve have a confirmed replacement date, and the gaps between the cancelled appointment and the new one are nine days, twenty-three days and thirty days.

The nine-day case is the encouraging one and the reason to keep expectations loose. An immigrant visa interview in Warsaw scheduled for 24 August was reissued for 2 September — barely more than a week. At the other end, a case at Dhaka cancelled on 23 August came back for 22 September, which matches the roughly one-month gap staff at that post described verbally on the day. So there is no single queue and no single delay. One post is turning these around in a week and another is taking a month.

The other nine have no date at all yet.

The cutoff is sharper than it looked

When we first wrote about this the pattern was blurry. It is not blurry any more. Every appointment we hold between 23 and 27 August was cancelled — ten out of ten. From 1 September onward, most were not: five reports in that window are confirmed still standing, including a K-1 at London and an immigrant visa at Mumbai both on 1 September, and one at Dhaka on 2 September.

Two September appointments were affected, so the line is not perfectly clean — one at Ciudad Juárez on 3 September, and one at London on 9 September where the medical went ahead but the pre-interview document check was refused on the day and both were pushed. But the concentration in that five-day window is strong enough to be worth acting on. If your appointment was in late August, assume it moved. If it is in September, the odds are currently that it did not.

One post has given an explicit answer, and only because someone asked for it. An applicant at Jakarta emailed the post directly and was told replacement dates would be issued after 31 August. That is the only timeframe any post has committed to in writing across all seventeen reports, and it was not volunteered.

A quarter of them were never told

This is the part that will cost people appointments. Three of the twelve affected applicants received no notice of any kind.

One travelled to a post in Japan and was turned away at the door. No cancellation email was ever sent; the cancellation was only visible after logging into the embassy account page. Two at Ciudad Juárez are several days past their cancelled dates with nothing in their inbox — and one of them reports that at that post the replacement notice is expected to arrive from a different sender address than the usual correspondence, which is exactly the sort of thing that lands in spam and stays there.

Here is the detail that should change how you check. All week we have been documenting cases where the portal was right and the email never arrived. The Warsaw case is the reverse: the reschedule email arrived and the scheduling site still showed no appointment scheduled. The portal was the stale one.

So neither system is authoritative on its own. If your appointment was in that late-August window, check all three — the scheduling portal, your email including spam and any unfamiliar sender, and CEAC. Applicants at Mumbai note that a sudden CEAC update can itself be the first sign of a reschedule, precisely because the email is unreliable.

One more shape worth knowing: at Bogotá the notice did not assign a new appointment at all. It said the application status had been modified and a further in-person appointment was required, to be booked by the applicant through the scheduling system. If you are waiting passively for a date to be handed to you, that may be a wait that never ends.

What we still cannot tell you

Three confirmed pairs is three. It is enough to say the gap ranges from about a week to about a month and that it varies by post; it is not enough to predict yours. We also cannot tell you why the 23–27 August window specifically, beyond what we corrected last week.

We have opened a tracker for this so the picture stops depending on scattered reports. If your interview was cancelled — or if it was in that window and was not, which is just as useful — you can add your original date, whether it was rescheduled, and the new date on the cancellations tracker. The unaffected reports are what let us draw the cutoff at all, so please add those too.