CBSA says airport inspection kiosks working again after outage

The Canada Border Services Agency says all inspection kiosks at Canadian airports are working again after an outage earlier Thursday.

A CBSA spokesperson told Global News 10 Canadian airports were impacted by an “unexpected technical issue during maintenance work.”

“At approximately 8:00 a.m. EST, the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) began experiencing a system outage affecting Primary Inspection Kiosks (PIK) at 10 Canadian international airports,” the CBSA said in an emailed statement.

“This failure was caused by an unexpected technical issue during maintenance work. It was not the result of any cyberattack.”

The CBSA also told Global News that airports impacted by the outage included Vancouver International Airport, Calgary International Airport, Edmonton International Airport, Winnipeg James Armstrong Richardson International Airport, Toronto Pearson International Airport, Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport, Ottawa International Airport, Montréal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport, Québec City Jean Lesage International Airport and Halifax Stanfield International Airport.

The agency adds that all kiosks were back online as of 12:00 p.m. Eastern, and that travellers are being processed manually with border services officers.

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Earlier Thursday morning, the CBSA notified the public about the outage in a social media post. At the time, the CBSA did not specify which airports were seeing their primary inspection kiosks impacted, and said it is working with partners to fix the issue.

Thursday’s outage marks the fourth time in less than two months that an outage has been reported by the CBSA involving the kiosks dating back to Sept. 28.

On Oct. 17, after the third outage was reported, Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree tasked the CBSA’s president Erin O’Gorman to report back to him within 30 days on “some of the challenges that we have been facing recently.”

At the time, the minister said “I can assure Canadians that our systems work, our systems work effectively.”