Almost 90 drones fell into Sydney harbour during a light show at the Vivid Sydney festival on Monday night, forcing organisers to cancel multiple performances and launch a technical investigation.
The incident occurred during the 7.30pm performance of Star-Bound, a drone display staged over Cockle Bay as part of an annual light and arts festival that draws large crowds to Sydney’s waterfront precincts, according to ABC.
Videos shared on social media showed drones breaking formation and dropping into the water while onlookers reacted in shock.
A Darling Harbour worker identified only as Robert told ABC that “everything seemed normal and then very shortly after that first image was displayed, on the southern side of Cockle Bay you started seeing drones dropping in the water and then from there it was a cascading failure of the drones”.
Robert said some drones appeared to fall close to workers near the marina. “The sound of them crashing on the wharf was considerable even from probably 10 to 15 or 20 metres away; you could hear them physically crash and smash onto the cement marina,” he said. “It’s remarkable no one was hurt.”
Another spectator, Adam Love, told the Sydney Morning Herald he noticed the drones enter what appeared to be a “test pattern” before they began falling. “They paused in formation for ages. It seems that behind the scenes they were madly scrambling to get them to reconnect,” Love said. “Many fell into the water.”
In a statement sent to The Independent, Skymagic, the British company operating the display, said that “89 drones landed in the water around Cockle Bay” after “an unforeseen change in the radio frequency (RF) environment occurring after take-off”.
This anomaly caused “a number of drones in the fleet to enact failsafe landing procedures in response to compromised positional accuracy,” the statement added. It said that pilots initiated a stop command that rendered the remaining drones stationary in the air before activating a return-to-home protocol to land unaffected devices safely.
“No vehicle escaped the safety boundary of the show parameters. Some vehicles during the emergency landing phase encountered the geofence boundary and shut down to preserve the safety zone resulting in them falling into the water,” said Skymagic.
No injuries were reported.
Organisers cancelled Monday’s later 9.30pm show shortly after the malfunction. On Tuesday, Vivid Sydney announced that all Star-Bound shows scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday evenings had also been cancelled while operators completed what organisers described as a “full technical and safety review”.
A spokesperson for Vivid Sydney told The Independent said the specialist drone operators had “identified a technical issue and made the decision to safely discontinue the show in line with standard safety protocols”.
“Public safety is always the number one priority and a full assessment is now underway with the specialist operators and relevant government agencies advising on next steps,” the spokesperson said.
The festival also apologised for the “disappointment and inconvenience caused to attendees”.
They added that “a decision was swiftly taken to cancel the 9.30pm performance to allow further assessment” and that Tuesday and Wednesday’s drone shows had been cancelled “as a precaution”.
Karen Jones, the chief executive of Destination NSW, the New South Wales government agency that runs Vivid Sydney, told ABC Radio Sydney on Tuesday that safety systems had functioned as intended during the malfunction.
“There was an exclusion zone that was specifically designed for the drone show and it did mean that if there was a technical failure – which there was last night – it meant that the drones either fell into the water or within that exclusion zone,” Jones said.
Jones said organisers had looked into whether the disruption may have involved deliberate interference with the drones’ communications systems, but said initial assessments found “there was no deliberate interference”.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau said it had been notified of the incident and was gathering further information.
Graham Doig, director of the drone programme at the University of New South Wales, told the Herald that Sydney’s wet weather may have disrupted communications between drones in the swarm.
“The conditions were pretty horrible in Sydney last night, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the main factor,” Doig said. He added that large drone fleets depended on highly precise communication systems and could be vulnerable to connectivity failures in dense urban environments where “signals are bouncing off buildings, there’s Wi-Fi interference, there’s all kinds of things”.
The Star-Bound show features up to 1,000 drones and had been scheduled to run twice nightly from Sunday to Wednesday across 11 nights during the festival. Vivid Sydney introduced drone shows in 2024 but did not hold them the following year after concerns about crowd management around Circular Quay.
The current display had been promoted by organisers as Australia’s “most extensive” drone event. According to festival material, the show was designed as “a celebration of life, creation, hope and renewal”.
