Travelers arriving at several of Canada’s busiest airports faced severe disruption on Sunday, with many reporting prolonged waits on planes and massive queues for immigration checks. Officials were working urgently to resolve a widespread outage affecting crucial border inspection kiosks.
The Canada Border Services Agency confirmed the system failure via social media, indicating that several Canadian airports were impacted. Key hubs in Montreal, Toronto, and Calgary specifically advised passengers to anticipate significant delays while passing through customs.
This system blackout, which commenced Sunday afternoon, disabled the digital kiosks used by travelers to verify their identity upon entry. Luke Reimer, a spokesperson for the agency, clarified just after midnight that the issue stemmed from an ‘unforeseen technical problem’ encountered during routine maintenance. These essential kiosks are deployed across ten airports nationwide.
In response, agency personnel have resorted to manually processing traveler information, working to mitigate the extensive backlog. The agency continues its efforts to fully restore the automated systems.
This is a developing story and will be updated as more information becomes available.