Thousands of travellers are facing flight delays after airports in the US were brought to standstill due to a technical issue affecting customs checks.

US Customs and Border Protection announced on Twitter yesterday there is a 'temporary outage with its processing systems at various airport of entry'.

Officers had to process international travellers using 'alternative procedures' until systems were back online.

Officials later said the systems are coming back online and travellers are finally being processed.

There is no indication the disruption was malicious in nature at this time, the agency added.

Travellers at more than 10 airports, including JFK Airport in New York, Dulles Airport in Washington and Philadelphia Airport, are experiencing a few hours of delays since the glitch happened at around 3.30pm ET, CNN reported.

The IT issue, however, is not impacting departures.

Videos posted on Twitter shows dozens of people queuing at the airport as they waited to cross the border control.

Some of them are seen sitting on the floor as they patiently wait in the queue in the packed customs area.

On an average day, the Customs and Border Protection processes around 358,000 air passengers and crew.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said the outage had not caused any changes in flights.

JKF Airport tweeted "Customs and Border Protection systems at JKF are back online. Some customs areas are still experiencing delays due to passenger volume."

Micah Lillard, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, told CNN that airport operations are running as normal.

This is not the first time the system has faced problems.

The system was down for four hours on January 2, 2017, as many travellers were returning from holiday trips.

Source: Read Full Article