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Primary inspection kiosks used for border screening at Toronto Pearson International Airport are back online after a lengthy outage that led to hours-long customs delays for arriving passengers on Friday evening.
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Systems restored after evening of disruption
According to published coverage, the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) reported a nationwide outage affecting its Primary Inspection Kiosks at multiple Canadian airports late on Friday, September 11, 2026. The disruption coincided with a busy evening arrival period at Toronto Pearson, where social media posts showed long lines of passengers waiting to clear customs.
CBSA advised via its public channels that travellers were being processed manually while technicians worked to restore the automated system. Arriving passengers at Toronto Pearson’s Terminals 1 and 3 reported waits stretching to several hours as the customs hall struggled to handle peak volumes without the usual self-service kiosks.
By early Saturday morning, September 12, reports from travel and aviation outlets indicated that the inspection kiosks had been brought back online, with airports beginning to reduce the backlog. One national outlet described the outage as “lengthy” and noted that wait times had gradually improved once the kiosks resumed operation.
Toronto Pearson’s own passenger information pages, which had carried a notice warning of a CBSA kiosk outage and potential delays at customs, now show normal wait times across international arrivals, suggesting that routine processing has largely resumed.
How the kiosk outage affected passengers
The malfunction hit at a vulnerable point in the arrival process. At Toronto Pearson, CBSA’s Primary Inspection Kiosks are a central feature of the customs flow for international passengers, allowing travellers to scan their documents, complete declarations and print a receipt before meeting a border services officer. When the system is unavailable, officers must complete these steps manually for each arriving traveller.
Accounts shared on community forums on Friday described planes being held at the gate while airport staff limited the number of passengers released into the customs hall at one time. Some travellers reported total journey extensions of several hours between landing and exiting the secure area, particularly on flights arriving from overseas during the peak evening bank.
Reddit users following the situation at Toronto Pearson and other major airports described customs halls filled to capacity and advised incoming passengers to prepare for what one post characterized as “3+ hour” waits at the height of the disruption. By late evening, contributors to the same threads began noting that kiosks were gradually coming back online and that some travellers were once again able to use automated processing.
Despite systems being restored, airport-watchers cautioned that delays were likely to persist into Saturday morning as CBSA worked through the remaining backlog of passengers whose flights landed during the outage window.
Part of a pattern of recent technical incidents
The latest outage follows a series of technical issues that have affected border inspection technology at Canadian airports over the past two years. Publicly available CBSA documentation on previous incidents highlights how failures in core databases and traveller processing systems have repeatedly led to slowdowns across major hubs, including Toronto Pearson, Montreal and Calgary.
Travel industry coverage and online discussion point to at least three national-scale kiosk disruptions in the 18 months leading up to this week’s event, with each incident triggering significant lineups as officers reverted to manual processing. In some cases, airlines were reported to have delayed boarding or held aircraft on the ground because customs halls were operating at or beyond capacity.
Local aviation observers note that Toronto Pearson, as Canada’s busiest airport, is particularly sensitive to such outages. When the self-service layer at customs drops offline, even brief interruptions can ripple quickly through connecting banks of flights, affecting both inbound and outbound journeys and complicating airline and airport efforts to keep operations on schedule.
In response to previous kiosk issues, airport planning documents have described investments in monitoring tools and contingency measures designed to keep certain functions running offline and to speed up incident detection. The recurrence of outages at the national system level, however, continues to test those safeguards.
Advice for travellers arriving at Toronto Pearson
With the latest outage now resolved, publicly available wait-time dashboards for Toronto Pearson indicate that security and customs processing have returned to typical ranges. Even so, travel advisers and frequent flyers commenting on Friday’s events recommend building in extra buffer time for upcoming itineraries, especially for tight connections involving international arrivals.
Traveller forums suggest several practical steps for those heading into Pearson in the coming days. Passengers are encouraged to complete any available pre-arrival declarations, have passports and supporting documents ready before reaching the customs hall, and monitor both their airline’s updates and the airport’s official channels for any renewed advisories on kiosk status.
Members of trusted-traveller programs such as NEXUS reported moving through the border more quickly during the outage, as those lanes rely on separate infrastructure. While these programs cannot prevent disruptions to the broader system, they can provide an additional layer of resilience for eligible passengers during irregular operations.
For now, the restoration of CBSA’s inspection kiosks has eased the immediate strain on Toronto Pearson’s arrivals operation. Travellers planning to pass through the airport this weekend are nevertheless being urged by online travel communities to remain prepared for residual congestion as the system stabilizes after another reminder of its technological fragility.
Sources
CBSA: How to use airport kiosks and eGates
Toronto Pearson: Customs and immigration information
News coverage of Toronto Pearson kiosk outage and restoration