Travelers arriving at several major Canadian airports faced a day of immense frustration and delays on Sunday, with many reporting being stranded inside planes for hours and then encountering packed terminals as they waited for immigration processing. This widespread disruption was caused by a critical outage affecting the automated border inspection kiosks.
The Canada Border Services Agency confirmed the technical issue, stating it was impacting multiple Canadian airports. Major hubs in Montreal, Toronto, and Calgary specifically advised passengers to anticipate significant delays while clearing customs. The problem, which began Sunday afternoon, rendered the digital identity verification kiosks inoperable. These self-service machines are vital components of the immigration process at ten airports across the country.
A spokesperson for the agency, Luke Reimer, explained that the outage stemmed from an “unforeseen technical issue” that occurred during routine maintenance. While efforts were underway to resolve the problem, agency staff resorted to manually processing traveler information, a much slower procedure. By early Monday morning, the full extent of the travel chaos was still not completely clear.
Canadian airline WestJet publicly noted that deplaning at a Toronto airport had been temporarily halted due to customs areas reaching full capacity in the wake of the kiosk failure. Despite inquiries, neither WestJet nor the affected Toronto airports (Pearson and Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport) immediately provided further details. Similarly, airports in Montreal and Calgary, which had initially warned of potential delays, did not offer immediate updates on how their operations were being affected.