The head of the Canada Border Services Agency on Friday called the recent outages of some airport inspection kiosks “not acceptable,” as the agency rushed to fix the third such equipment failure in less than a month.
CBSA president Erin O’Gorman said the agency works with its partners “relentlessly” to prevent outages and has contingency plans in place.
“It’s not acceptable that they go down, and we are working with our partners to make sure they don’t go down — and when they do, that we are ready to put them back up again,” she told reporters at a border security announcement in Niagara Falls, Ont.
The CBSA said an outage reported Friday morning was still ongoing as of 2 p.m. eastern at Toronto Pearson International Airport, Calgary International Airport and Edmonton International Airport.
An agency spokesperson told Global News that inspection kiosks were also impacted at Toronto’s Billy Bishop International Airport and Ottawa International Airport, but that they have since been brought back online.
“This failure was caused by an unexpected technical issue during maintenance work,” the spokesperson said in an email. “It was not the result of any cyberattack.”
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Toronto Pearson International Airport said on X that passengers in terminals 1 and 3 may experience longer-than-normal wait times at customs.
It follows a similar outage on Oct. 2 that affected Toronto Pearson as well as Montreal Trudeau International Airport, Ottawa International Airport and Calgary International Airport for about three hours.
That outage came days after kiosks went offline due to what CBSA called “unforeseen technical problems during routine systems maintenance” on Sept. 28.
The agency has said the recent outages also affected commercial processing at some land border crossings.
Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree said Friday he has tasked O’Gorman to report back to him within 30 days on “some of the challenges that we have been facing recently,” but added that agency staff are tasked to ensure outages are resolved quickly.
“I can assure Canadians that our systems work, our systems work effectively,” the minister said.
“Of course, there may be at times some outages and as soon as we find out, we make every effort to fix it in an expedited timeline.”
International arrivals at affected airports have been rerouted to in-person customs inspection booths, leading to delays for travellers.
“Safety and security standards are upheld at all times, with border services officers working to verify travellers’ identities, receive their declarations, and conduct any additional screening warranted by each traveller’s individual circumstances,” the agency told Global News.
“The CBSA works closely with airport management to expedite traveller processing, minimize delays, and complete verifications as required.”
Manual processing was also enacted for commercial traffic at land border crossings, leading to delays.
The CBSA said at the time that it was working with Shared Services Canada, the Crown agency that provides IT services across government, to reduce the risk of future outages.
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CBSA resolves new airport kiosk outage, chief says issues ‘not acceptable’
