eManifest Portal Maintenance This Weekend: The One-Hour Window You Can Ignore

The Notice

CBSA posted a scheduled maintenance notice for the eManifest Portal this weekend: Saturday October 24 and Sunday October 25, 2026, between 06:00 and 07:00 ET. One hour each day. The portal stays up. You might get forced to re-login. That’s it.

If you’re a carrier filing ACI (Advance Commercial Information) on a Saturday morning at 6:15 am, you log back in and keep going. If you’re a broker who doesn’t touch eManifest on weekends anyway, this notice changes nothing.

The real question this raises is not about a one-hour window where you might have to re-authenticate. It’s whether you know what happens when eManifest actually goes down hard, and whether your operation has a working contingency that isn’t just “wait and hope.”

Who Files What, and When

eManifest is the carrier’s filing obligation, not the broker’s. Carriers and freight forwarders transmit ACI before the goods arrive at the first point of arrival in Canada. The timing rules under CBSA’s eManifest program depend on mode:

• Highway: 1 hour before arrival at the border
• Rail: 2 hours before arrival (4 hours for certain high-risk corridors)
• Marine containerized: 24 hours before load at foreign port
• Air: wheels-up or 4 hours, whichever is shorter

Brokers interact with eManifest when we need to pull a cargo control number, check if a shipment has arrived, or troubleshoot a mismatch between what the carrier filed and what’s on the commercial invoice. Most of that work happens during the week, during business hours, when shipments are moving and CBSA is processing releases.

Saturday and Sunday ACI filings happen, but they’re a small fraction of weekday volume. If you’re running Saturday trucking schedules or clearing weekend air freight for Monday delivery, you’re in the portal. If you’re not, this maintenance window is invisible.

The Difference Between a Re-Login and an Actual Outage

A forced re-login is not an outage. The portal is up. You can create documents, submit filings, update user access. You just have to type your password again.

An actual eManifest outage is when the system is offline and you cannot transmit ACI electronically. That triggers CBSA’s System Outage Contingency Plan, which means carriers call the local CBSA office, provide shipment details by phone or fax, and get a manual release number. It’s slow, it’s a nuisance, and it happens rarely enough that most carriers don’t drill the procedure until they’re in the middle of it.

If you’re a carrier or a customs broker who files volume on weekends, you should have the CBSA contingency contact numbers saved and tested. Not for this weekend’s maintenance window, but for the next time the system actually goes down and you have a truckload sitting at the border.

CARM vs eManifest: Different Systems, Different Maintenance

One clarification worth making: CARM (the customs accounting and revenue management system that went live with Release 3 on October 21, 2024) and eManifest are separate systems. CARM is where we file the CAD (Commercial Accounting Declaration, the replacement for the old B3), manage the Release Prior to Payment bond, and pull the monthly Statement of Account. eManifest is where carriers file pre-arrival data.

CBSA schedules maintenance for each system independently. A CARM outage does not affect eManifest, and vice versa. This weekend’s eManifest maintenance does not touch the CARM Client Portal, and if you’re filing CADs on a Saturday (we occasionally do for urgent Monday releases), the CARM side is unaffected.

The two systems talk to each other at the point of release: the cargo control number from the ACI filing links to the CAD we file for customs clearance. But the portals, the maintenance windows, and the contingency procedures are distinct.

What Actually Matters: Your Filing Window and the Release Clock

The reason ACI timing matters is not the one-hour maintenance window. It’s the release clock. CBSA processes releases during business hours at the local port of entry. If a carrier’s ACI is late, the shipment doesn’t show up in CBSA’s system when the broker files for release. That delays clearance, which delays pickup, which can push a container past the port’s free time or miss a cross-dock cutoff.

For Montreal imports, that timing pressure is real. A late Friday ACI filing that doesn’t clear until Monday morning can add two days of dwell time and trigger demurrage or per-diem charges at the terminal. If the shipment is moving through a bonded facility for deconsolidation or inspection, the delay compounds.

The maintenance window itself is irrelevant to that math. What matters is whether your carrier files ACI on time, whether your broker has the documentation ready to file the CAD as soon as the shipment hits CBSA’s system, and whether everyone involved knows the release cutoff times for the terminal or warehouse receiving the goods.

Contingency Is Not “Wait for CBSA to Fix It”

Most importers and carriers don’t think about eManifest contingency until the system is down and a truck is waiting. The System Outage Contingency Plan exists, and it works, but it’s manual and slower than the electronic process. If your compliance program includes business continuity planning, the eManifest outage scenario should be in there with contact numbers, filing procedures, and a clear delegation of who calls CBSA when the portal is unavailable.

The one-hour re-login window this weekend is not that scenario. But the notice is a reminder that the system is not infallible, and the fallback is only as fast as the people executing it.

If your weekend freight operation depends on eManifest access and you’ve never tested the phone/fax contingency, this is the conversation to have with your carrier and your broker before the next unscheduled outage hits during a peak shipping week.

Get in touch if you want to walk through your ACI timing or review your release process for Monday-morning clearances.

Source: CSCB