Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada confirmed on Saturday morning that a nationwide outage affecting its secure MyAccount and Employer Portal systems lasted nearly nine hours overnight from 22:05 EDT 27 March to 07:01 EDT 28 March. The disruption prevented applicants from submitting electronic permanent-resident (PR) cards, Post-Graduation Work Permit (PGWP) extensions and Labour Market Impact Assessment-exempt employer compliance fees. IRCC blamed the outage on a failed database replication update and said no personal data were compromised. To mitigate prejudice, the department is granting an automatic 48-hour extension to any submission deadlines that fell inside the outage window, including biometrics response letters and additional document requests. Affected clients will receive a secure-message confirmation in their online accounts by 18:00 EDT tonight. The downtime also delayed employers’ ability to generate offer of employment numbers, which are required before many foreign nationals can submit work-permit applications at ports of entry. Travel-planning advisers recommend that cross-border commuters and business travellers carrying ‘employer-specific’ job offers print the IRCC notice of extension and be prepared for secondary inspections at land crossings through Monday. Although IRCC’s public-facing website remained accessible, users experienced intermittent “HTTP 500” errors when attempting to download some application forms. The department says it will reschedule today’s planned online citizenship test sessions and e-landing virtual oath ceremonies later in the week. IT analysts note that the outage is the latest in a series of service-interruption incidents this quarter. Businesses that file high-volume global-mobility cases are urged to build a two-to-three-day buffer into critical filing strategies until IRCC completes its infrastructure-modernisation project later this year.
Source: The Canadian Press
