Passengers arriving at several major Canadian airports reported being stranded on planes for hours and stuck in terminals full of people waiting for immigration checks on Sunday, as officials scrambled to fix an outage at border inspection kiosks.
The Canada Border Services Agency reported the outage on social media, saying that it was affecting some Canadian airports. Major airports in Montreal, Toronto and Calgary warned that passengers may experience delays as they pass through customs.
The outage began on Sunday afternoon and affects kiosks where people verify their identity on a screen, Luke Reimer, a spokesman for the agency, said in a statement just after midnight. The kiosks are used at 10 airports across Canada.
Mr. Reimer said the outage was caused by “an unforeseen technical issue” during routine maintenance, and that the agency was still working to fix it. The agency’s staff was manually processing travelers’ information in the meantime, he added.
The exact scope of the delays was not immediately clear as of early Monday morning.
The Canadian airline WestJet said on social media that a Toronto airport had paused deplaning because customs were at full capacity after the kiosk outage. Neither the airline nor the two Toronto airports that use the kiosks — Toronto Pearson Airport and Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport — responded immediately to inquiries.
Airports in Montreal and Calgary that warned passengers of potential delays also did not immediately respond to questions about how the outage was affecting their operations.
Mike Ives is a reporter for The Times based in Seoul, covering breaking news around the world.
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