Toronto & Montreal airports experience another CBSA inspection kiosk outage

It happened again.

The outage that affected the Canada Border Services Agency’s (CBSA’s) primary inspection kiosks on Sunday (Sept. 28) at Canadian airports – an incident that, at Toronto Pearson, resulted in passengers being held on airplanes and forced into long lineups at customs– struck again Thursday (Oct. 2).

As reported by Global News, another system outage began around 10:20 a.m. EST yesterday, forcing the agency to revert to manual processing of international arrivals, which inevitably led to delays.

CBSA said the matter was resolved within three hours, but warned that travellers might still experience delays in the short term.

A spokesperson told the outlet that yesterday’s outage was related to the glitch that affected the kiosk system on Sunday.

The problem is said to be caused by “an unforeseen technical problem during routine systems maintenance,” not a cyberattack.

Earlier Thursday, both Toronto Pearson and Montreal airports advised on X that an outage was unfolding.

Four hours to exit Pearson

The last thing you—or your clients—need is to be caught in a kiosk outage.

The kiosks, also known as e-gates, are used to confirm travellers’ identity and submit their customs declaration.

Ten Canadian airports currently use the kiosks, which were first unveiled in 2017 in order to streamline arrivals.

PAX was among the hundreds (if not thousands) of international arrivals affected by Sunday’s kiosk outage at Toronto Pearson (outages were also reported in Montreal and Calgary).

The delays lasted several hours after passengers, arriving on multiple international flights, were forced into a massive line at Canadian customs at Terminal 1 for manual processing.

For crowd control purposes, travellers were also held on arriving aircraft until the CBSA authorized disembarkation.

Several frustrated travellers were overheard calling the chaos "worse than the pandemic," a reference to the severe staffing shortages that once caused lengthy arrival delays.

Here’s how it went down for PAX: after landing at Toronto Pearson on an Air Canada flight from Athens, we were told that we would need to wait at least 45 minutes before deplaning.

That wait inside the plane stretched to almost two hours, and once we were finally permitted to disembark, we found ourselves in an enormous line—easily a thousand people deep—leading to Canadian customs.

NEXUS members were able to fast-track, but for everyone else, the process dragged on for nearly two hours.

From the time we were held on the aircraft to finally clearing the processing line, exiting Toronto Pearson took us nearly four hours — and for others, the wait was reportedly even longer.

Sunday’s incident wasn’t the first time a kiosk outage disrupted travel — similar incidents in April and June also caused delays at several major airports.

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