UPDATE 10/3: The road and ramp closures that were in place have been lifted, and the Niagara Falls Bridge Commission and Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority are no longer asking commercial drivers to avoid the Lewiston-Queenston Bridge and Peace Bridge crossings.
ORIGINAL: A computer outage caused delays at Canadian border crossings this week, including the Peace Bridge in Buffalo and the Queenston-Lewiston Bridge in Lewiston.
On Tuesday, the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) told 7 News it was experiencing a system outage that was causing delays in commercial processing at ports of entry in the Southern Ontario Region.
The CBSA said issues began following routine maintenance on Sunday morning. On Tuesday morning, traffic backups had to be flushed from I-190 as a safety measure. The CBSA said primary inspection lanes at the Peace Bridge and Queenston-Lewiston Bridge were staffed with officers to process traffic and shipments. During the outage, commercial shipments requiring inspection were unable to obtain electronic approval and inspections were conducted manually using paper forms.
On Wednesday morning, the CBSA announced the outage had been fully resolved and said a data entry problem during the maintenance caused the outage and is being investigated. Commercial drivers may experience some short-term delays as normal processing resumes. Systems are being monitored for stability while traffic and shipping return to normal.
The CBSA said in a statement to 7 News on Thursday that while the original systems outage that caused the bridge backups has been resolved, commercial drivers continue to experience delays as the agency resumes normal processing and works to clear a backlog of requests received during the outage.
You can watch our reports from Thursday evening below.
WATCH: Commercial drivers heading to Canada face another day of traffic delays on Thursday
WATCH: Commerical drivers heading to Canada voice frustration after 3 days of delays
You can watch our original report on the outage from Tuesday evening below.
WATCH: Canadian computer outage causes backups at border crossings, including Peace Bridge in Buffalo
Commercially, Robert Rich with ROAR Logistics in Buffalo, an intermediary for shipping, told 7 News that the delays would cost several businesses thousands.
“Once you start getting into four to five hours, tens of thousands of dollars in lost productivity. You’ve got trucks missing appointments, and you’ve got drivers sitting,” Rich said. “It’s more being perplexed, when you look at the level of technology that we have in the world these days, to see a system as simple as this break down.”
David Galante, Vice President of Trucking company Speed Global Services in the Town of Tonawanda, told 7 News they ship to Canada every day, but decided not to send any of their normal trucks to Canada on Tuesday due to the major delays.
“Telling our customers in Canada that the deliveries coming to them are not going to happen [Tuesday],” Galante said. “[We’re] just kind of waiting for that information [about what happened] to come to us.”
“We’ve got to find out why this happened…Was this a cybersecurity issue? Was this just antiquated infrastructure?” Congressman Nick Langworthy said. “We have been in touch this morning with all our United States agencies that have jurisdiction over the border. They assure us this is a purely Canadian issue. I guess we await word from the Canadian government on why their system collapsed.”
