SFO Immigration Shut Down For IT Problems
 

Landed from UA 858. Passport control lines extend all the way to the end of the immigration hallway. Since I've landed, it's been down. :20 mins and counting.

Update 1: :30 mins and counting. No announcements, other than what is spreading by passengers from the beginning of the line. Wonder if CBP has a backup plan in cases like this?

Update 2: they just announced that the system has been down since 8:00 am and they are "working on the backup plan." Wow, a backup plan that still isn't in place 3 hours later...

Update 3: About 11:15(?) or so, the systems sprang to life and things began to move again.

Has anyone been in a precedent for this?

I was picking up my folks at LAX coming in from LHR. The immigration computers were down and both of us were stuck waiting 4 hours, them inside the arrivals hall and me out in the car. The breakdown made the local news.

The flySFO twitter account says the systems are online now and that they've been providing water to pax and upping the custodial services to keep lavs clean.

That's gotta be a rough way to finish a long-haul flight.

This happened to me about a year ago at SFO. It was before I had GE and I was out of the hallway and in the main hall just before the immigration officers. We waited two hours, nothing moved. The line went all the way down the main hall to the last gate. Must have been several thousand people in line. At least I was near the front and had no connection that day.

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I might have missed it, but was GE not working as well?

Nothing was working in my case. All lanes were dead.

The was exactly my experience today. I've never seen that hallway so full of people. Reminded me of LAX! :D

Correct, nothing was working. When the systems came back up, the GE terminals were the first indication we had. With no one standing there doing anything to them, they just suddenly beeped, the screens flashed, and within two seconds, Boom! They were booted and ready for business. Even those that didn't have GE cheered!

I suffered a similar CBP computer malfunction on arrival at GUM several years ago. After waiting in line for hours in sauna conditions, I was very fortunate to be skipped ahead by an airline manager (not even the one I was flying with to/from GUM) because I would have missed my connection (despite it being several hours long transit).

It seems CBP is incapable of manually processing more than a 2-3 passengers an hour per officer.

they should establish some quick-processing method to manually process arrivals in case the systems go down.......

In the post-9/11 world, I don't think they can do paper processing anymore. CBP officers need to run queries in the computer to make sure they catch individuals who have outstanding warrants or other red flags in one of the many national and international databases that are networked together.

I was thinking that they could use LogMeIn or a similar system to run the searches remotely at another facility that has functioning connections to the databases.

There must be some way to process manually or semi-manually. In my GUM experience I was processed through immigration before the systems came back on.

Hellish greeting for incoming pax at SFO today
 

The computers at CBP went down for a few hours on Saturday morning, just in time to trap all the pax from Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, Sydney, etc. in the arrivals hall. Fortunately my MEX flight beat the rush, but still ...

At one point they handed out I-94 forms to all the folks in the visitors line, but these turned out not to be needed. Folks with "A" visas - ie foreign diplomats, government types - got pulled from the line for special handling.

Not sure if these things happen often, but it's pretty embarrassing esp. in SFO - the world's technology capital.

Oh yeah, is the weather at SFO never NOT lousy?

:confused::confused::confused:

Silicon Valley ≠ San Francisco

Well, OK ... But San Francisco does have Twitter and AirBnB and god knows what else, and SFO is the first port of call for tech folks from Asia.