Ottawa, Ontario
The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) is committed to supporting public safety and facilitating the flow of trade and travel. Shared Services Canada (SSC) provides secure IT infrastructure services that support and enable the effective delivery of government programs and services.
The CBSA has recently experienced IT systems outages resulting in delays for travellers and commercial processing.
These outages started following unforeseen technical problems during routine systems maintenance on Sunday, September 28. They were not the result of a cyberattack.
While the initial outages were resolved within 48 hours, the impacts on kiosks at airports and on commercial processing at some ports of entry continued as the CBSA worked to address the backlogs that were created.
During the outages, the Agency worked with airport authorities and bridge and tunnel operators to manage delays and complete screening and verifications. Lanes were fully staffed with border services officers who were manually processing travellers, traffic and shipments, as fast as possible while ensuring safety and security.
Regular operations have resumed, traveller and commercial volumes are back to normal and systems are back to service standards. We continue to investigate the causes of the outages and will provide a report to the Minister of Public Safety within 30 days.
The CBSA is working closely with SSC to reduce the risk of future outages, to minimize any system downtime, and also to strengthen our contingency plans based on the experience gained from these recent outages.
We would like to thank all travellers, truckers, partners and stakeholders for their cooperation and patience during these outages and we apologize for the inconveniences they have caused.
If you are driving into Canada, you can check current estimated wait times at 28 of Canada's busiest land border crossings.
