The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) says it has resolved another system outage that affected its inspection kiosks at airports across Canada on Oct. 2, but travellers may continue to face delays.
“The outage has been resolved,” the CBSA said in an Oct. 2 X post around 1:50 p.m. “Travellers may continue to experience delays in the short term as we resume normal processing operations. We thank you for your patience and apologize for any inconvenience experienced.”
The CBSA began experiencing the system outage at approximately 10:20 a.m. EDT on Oct. 2, which affected the agency’s primary inspection kiosks (PIK) at multiple Canadian international airports, a CBSA spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email.
Airports in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City, and Halifax may have been affected by the outage, the spokesperson said.
Toronto Pearson International Airport warned travellers in an X post around 11:45 a.m. that the outage was impacting Terminal 1 and 3, and passengers could experience “longer than normal” wait times.
The electronic inspection kiosks aim to speed up processing times during international travel to and from Canada by verifying traveller identity and receiving customs declarations.
As the kiosks were temporarily shut down, travellers were redirected to primary inspection lines to be processed manually by border services officers. The spokesperson said the CBSA worked with airport management to speed up traveller processing, minimize delays, and complete verifications as required.
“We would also like to clarify that this PIK system outage was linked to the PIK outage earlier this week, which was caused by an unforeseen technical problem during routine systems maintenance,” the spokesperson said. “It was not the result of any cyberattack.”
The CBSA system outage that occurred earlier this week took place on Sept. 28 and also impacted inspection kiosks at several major airports including in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec City.
The agency said the outage was caused by an “unexpected technical issue during routine maintenance” and was resolved as of 2 a.m. on Sept. 29. In this incident, some passengers were held on planes for more than an hour after landing at Toronto Pearson International Airport since customs was at full capacity due to the outage.
A three-and-a-half hour disruption to the electronic inspection kiosks across Canada last year also led to delays for numerous passengers coming in and out of Canada.
Canada-US Border Delays
The CBSA also experienced another system outage earlier this week that led to delays for commercial trucks at the Canada-U.S. border in southern Ontario.
As a result of the outage, the primary inspection lanes at Peace Bridge and Queenston-Lewiston bridge were staffed with CBSA officers to process traffic and shipments, a CBSA spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email. The agency also worked with its partners at the Peace Bridge Authority and the Niagara Falls Bridge Commission to assist with traffic control.
The Canadian Trucking Alliance (CTA) commented on the CBSA system issues, saying outages have “significantly” increased in frequency and duration lately, and have been “highly disruptive” to commercial carriers and their customers.
The CTA says the agency’s IT systems can no longer handle the growing demands of the e-commerce and trade data they are required to process. Therefore, the alliance has called on the Ottawa to invest in the CBSA’s IT infrastructure to reduce cross-border delays.
