Travelers arriving at several of Canada’s largest airports experienced an unexpected throw-back to pre-automation days on the morning of November 13 when the Canada Border Services Agency’s primary inspection kiosks went dark during routine maintenance.
From about 08:30 a.m. Eastern Time, passengers at Toronto Pearson, Vancouver, Montréal-Trudeau, Calgary and other international gateways were redirected to traditional officer-manned primary inspection lines. Although frontline officers kept traffic moving, peak-hour line-ups lengthened as each traveller’s customs declaration had to be processed manually.
![CBSA restores inspection kiosks after nationwide outage at major Canadian airports]()
CBSA confirmed the outage in a social-media post at 10:30 a.m., attributing the problem to “planned maintenance.” By 12:30 p.m. the Agency said all kiosks were back online, and airport authorities reported minimal residual delays.
The incident is the third kiosk failure since late September and has reignited industry calls for greater system redundancy. Airlines and airport associations have pressed Ottawa to accelerate implementation of the cloud-based next-generation Primary Inspection Kiosk (PIK 2.0) platform, which is expected to allow remote fail-over and faster patching.
For business travellers and global mobility managers the lesson is clear: always build buffer time into itineraries and encourage travellers to complete the Advance Declaration in the ArriveCAN app—doing so allows CBSA officers to pull declarations even when kiosks are offline, shortening manual processing. Until the new platform is fully rolled out, sporadic technology disruptions will remain a risk factor in Canadian arrivals planning.
From about 08:30 a.m. Eastern Time, passengers at Toronto Pearson, Vancouver, Montréal-Trudeau, Calgary and other international gateways were redirected to traditional officer-manned primary inspection lines. Although frontline officers kept traffic moving, peak-hour line-ups lengthened as each traveller’s customs declaration had to be processed manually.
CBSA confirmed the outage in a social-media post at 10:30 a.m., attributing the problem to “planned maintenance.” By 12:30 p.m. the Agency said all kiosks were back online, and airport authorities reported minimal residual delays.
The incident is the third kiosk failure since late September and has reignited industry calls for greater system redundancy. Airlines and airport associations have pressed Ottawa to accelerate implementation of the cloud-based next-generation Primary Inspection Kiosk (PIK 2.0) platform, which is expected to allow remote fail-over and faster patching.
For business travellers and global mobility managers the lesson is clear: always build buffer time into itineraries and encourage travellers to complete the Advance Declaration in the ArriveCAN app—doing so allows CBSA officers to pull declarations even when kiosks are offline, shortening manual processing. Until the new platform is fully rolled out, sporadic technology disruptions will remain a risk factor in Canadian arrivals planning.
