CBSA probing passport kiosk outages at airports, rules out cyberattack

The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) is continuing its investigation into a string of IT outages that recently disrupted its primary inspection kiosks at select airports.

The outages, which led to significant traveller delays at multiple airports, impact CBSA’s passport kiosks, also known as e-gates, which are used to confirm travellers’ identity and submit their customs declaration.

The issue started following “unforeseen technical problems” during a routine systems maintenance last Sunday (Sept. 28), said the agency in a press release, noting that it’s not the result of a cyberattack.

Caught in the chaos

PAX was among the hundreds (if not thousands) of international arrivals affected by the outage that Sunday at Toronto Pearson.

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.

READ MORE: Kiosk outage resolved, says CBSA; travellers held for hours at Toronto Pearson

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

In our case, 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, however, 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 customs, exiting Toronto Pearson took nearly four hours — and for others, the wait was reportedly even longer.

A second outage happened at Toronto and Montreal airports days later, on October 2, adding to similar incidents that occurred in April and June earlier this year.

CBSA speaks out

Ten Canadian airports currently use e-gates, which were first unveiled in 2017 in order to streamline arrivals.

Addressing last week’s outages on Monday (Oct. 6), the CBSA said the problems were resolved within 48 hours.

However, the impacts on kiosks at airports and on commercial processing at some ports of entry continued as the CBSA worked to address the backlogs that were created.

“During the outages, the agency worked with airport authorities and bridge and tunnel operators to manage delays and complete screening and verifications. Lanes were fully staffed with border services officers who were manually processing travellers, traffic and shipments, as fast as possible while ensuring safety and security,” the CBSA said in a press release.

Regular operations have since resumed and traveller and commercial volumes are back to normal, the agency said, noting that it will be providing a report to the Minister of Public Safety within 30 days.

“The CBSA is working closely with SSC to reduce the risk of future outages, to minimize any system downtime, and also to strengthen our contingency plans based on the experience gained from these recent outages,’ the agency said.

“We would like to thank all travellers, truckers, partners and stakeholders for their cooperation and patience during these outages and we apologize for the inconveniences they have caused.”

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