Border crossing computers fail in $3.5M mishap

Border crossing computers fail in a 24 hour mishap that cost the trucking industry millions. 

The computers on the Mexico side of the Otay Mesa Port of Entry in California began malfunctioning on Wednesday morning, February 7th, limiting the amount of semi trucks that could cross into the United States for nearly 24 hours. The computer system was back up by 8 a.m. on Thursday, February 8th, but not before costing drivers and companies money. 

“Here in Tijuana we have about 7,000 crossings daily around this time of the year,” said Israel Delgado Vallejo, vice president of the National Truckers Council in Tijuana.

“Every load means at least $250 to our drivers, more if you have to drive to Los Angeles or to the east, so we lost about $3.5 million due to this malfunction,” Vallejo said to DC News Now.

The computer system in question is operated and kept up by the Mexico National Guard, but they have not commented on the most recent disruption. Past disruptions have been blamed on poor internet connection. 

Border traffic in south Texas was also affected this week by another outage involving an outage of Mexico customs equipment.

 “If you ain’t got patience, you in trouble, especially in trucking ‘cause they want us to be perfect,” said one driver stuck at the southern border. “They want us to be on time. They don’t want us to be late. We got to go through traffic and accidents. We got to go through everything, crazy drivers… we got to go through it all.”