(Newswire.net — October 16, 2015) — According to NBC news report, problems and outages affected Customs and Border Protection systems preventing Customs personal from crosschecking passengers with the Department of Homeland Security’s terrorist watch list.
Issues were reported at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, Los Angeles International Airport, Logan International Airport in Boston, Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport in Texas, and other airports in Seattle, Charlotte and Baltimore.
The world’s busiest Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport also reported problems with the security crosscheck system that screens passengers against a terrorist watch list.
According to officials, the system was out for about hour and the half. Callin it a “brief disruption” officials said they restored systems, however, the cause of the outage is not yet known.
“CBP officers processed international travelers using alternative procedures until systems were back on line,” CBP said in a statement, explaining the organizational issue while the system was down.
“At this time, there is no indication the service disruption was malicious in nature,” the statement reads.
The outage of the Homeland Security System at the customs, however, caused standstills at immigration checkpoints, travelers reported.
Some of the passengers tweeted that they have been told that the situation could take hours to resolve. Others feared they could miss the connected flights over the computer outage that induced a standstills at the security check points.
Electronic kiosks where passengers can fill out self-service declaration forms were down, and there were noticeably more staff at customs counters — “looks like they paged a bunch of people to come in,” passenger Jeremy Hitchcock said.
Meanwhile, the another outage was reported at the Emirates airline check-in counter at JFK, however, it is not yet known if the incident is related to the CBP outage.