A U.S. Customs computer outage that stranded more than 17,000 passengers at LAX was blamed Sunday on faulty hardware and an insufficient backup system that left frustrated travelers sitting on planes or standing in long lines.
Saturday night's delays in screening people arriving on international flights were unprecedented, said Kevin Weeks, director of Los Angeles field operations for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency.
The computer malfunction, which began at 2 p.m. Saturday and lasted about 10 hours, came on a peak summer travel day, when nearly 25,000 international passengers arrived at the airport.
The customs agency reported Sunday that 17,398 passengers on 73 flights were affected by Saturday's outage.
The entire system was up and running just before midnight. But it took four hours early Sunday for customs officers to clear a long backlog of passengers.
"Our system's up and we're back to normal," Michael Fleming, a spokesman for the Customs and Border Protection agency in Los Angeles, said Sunday morning.
Nevertheless, passengers were still dealing with the aftermath. Many were still angry and frustrated about their disrupted vacations and other trips because they had missed connecting flights.
"This is the worst delay I've ever encountered, and I travel a lot," said Rosita Iglesias, 47, of Tujunga, who was heading to Cancun, Mexico.
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa issued a statement Sunday saying he had contacted Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to request a "thorough investigation and incident report, which should include changes to procedures and protocols to ensure faster and more convenient processing of passengers" in case of another such incident. He called Saturday's disruption "both troubling and unacceptable."
The outage forced some planes to sit on the tarmac for so long Saturday night that workers had to refuel them to keep their power units and air conditioners running. Maintenance trucks drove around the airport, with workers hooking up tubes to aircraft to service airplane lavatories.
"This is probably one of the worst days we've had. I've been with the agency for 30 years, and I've never seen the system go down and stay down for as long as it did," said Peter Gordon, acting port director for the customs agency.
