A nationwide Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) passport kiosk outage disrupted travel across several major Canadian airports on Sunday, leading to hours-long customs delays before being resolved early Monday.
The technical issue, which occurred during routine systems maintenance, prevented passport verification at inspection kiosks and even affected check-ins for Canada-bound flights abroad. Airline staff were forced to manually call Canadian authorities to verify documents, slowing departures from U.S. airports like New York’s LaGuardia.
ArriveCAN app declarations were also down during the outage.
Major airports including Toronto Pearson, Montreal Trudeau, Calgary International, and Vancouver International reported longer-than-usual wait times, with passengers redirected to manual inspection lines.
CBSA said safety and security standards remained in place as officers manually verified traveller identities and declarations.
Some passengers reported delays of more than three hours before clearing customs. Eric Tordjman, stranded in Calgary, said the glitch caused him to miss two flights back to Toronto: “It was causing a lot of frustration. Everyone’s just telling us to be patient.”
By Sunday night, wait times at Pearson had improved to about 90 minutes.
This marks at least the third nationwide kiosk outage in 2025, after similar disruptions in April and June.
