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In
a tweet at 6:37 p.m. EDT (2237 GMT), CBP said "the affected
systems are coming back online and travelers are being
processed."
It said there was "no indication the disruption was malicious in
nature at this time."
Earlier, CBP said officers were processing international
travelers using alternative procedures, which caused "longer
than usual wait times."
The computer issue was not impacting departures.
People at various U.S. airports posted videos on social media
sites of lengthy lines at processing checkpoints and several
airports warned of extensive delays.
On an average day, CBP processes around 358,000 air passengers
and crew.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said the outage had
not caused any changes in flights.
This is not the first time the system has faced problems. The
system was down for four hours on Jan. 2, 2017, as many
travelers were returning from holiday trips.
A Homeland Security inspector general's office report issued in
November 2017 found "inadequate CBP software capacity testing,
leaving the potential for recurrence of processing errors."
The report also warned of "inadequate business continuity and
disaster recovery capabilities to minimize the impact of system
failures on the traveling public. Until such deficiencies are
addressed, CBP lacks a means to minimize the possibility and
impact of similar system outages in the future."
CBP told the inspector general in 2017 that as "CBP moves to a
cloud computing environment, improved performance and lead
testing to emulate a production environment will be included in
the requirements."
(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Chris Reese and
Sandra Maler)
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