Canadian customs’ Primary Inspection Kiosks and NEXUS kiosks were down across the country Sunday, causing serious delays at major airports including Montreal’s Trudeau international airport’s customs hall.
All passengers arriving in Canada must enter their personal information in those kiosks before seeing a Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) agent.
Because of the outage, which started Sunday morning, according to Trudeau airport spokesperson Anne-Sophie Hamel, each passenger had to be processed manually.
This is one of the busiest times of the year at Trudeau airport, said Hamel, which explains the long lines.
Passengers are losing their patience.
“There’s no air conditioning, parents are holding crying babies, everybody is stuck against each other,” said Julie Bartholomew, a doctor at Montreal’s Jewish General hospital who has been waiting to clear customs.
“There must be at least a thousand people here. This is really bad,” she said.
On its Twitter page, Montreal airport is asking passengers for their co-operation as the kiosks service gradually resumes.
In a statement, CBSA said that the unscheduled national outage was due to technical issues, but that the situation has since been resolved.
“Throughout the outage, CBSA management and airport or bridge authorities worked collaboratively to facilitate arriving passenger flows and border clearances until the outage was resolved,” the statement reads.