Mexico City, Mexico – A technical outage at Mexico City International Airport on Wednesday was due to an attempted cable theft. On Wednesday morning, hundreds of passengers were affected by the technical breakdown felt at the airport’s immigration service.
Passengers entering and leaving Terminal 2 were delayed because immigration officers were unable to electronically examine passports and other passenger documents. Passengers on Aeromexico flights from Chicago, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Lima, Vancouver, Houston, Miami, Istanbul and Austin were affected by the outage.
Other flights, such as Aeroméxico’s AM905 Monterrey to Mexico City, ended up being diverted to Acapulco at 6:45 a.m.
On Wednesday, authorities reported that after a remote examination, it was determined that an attempted cable theft near Mexico City International Airport (AICM) had damaged the fiber optic.
“We have a record that on Wednesday morning a group of people tried to steal the underground cabling thinking it was copper cable, but that cabling was fiber optic which ended up breaking. and cause the reported outages in Terminal 2,” Renato Flores Cartas, spokesperson for América Móvil México reported.
“This morning there was a technical failure in the migration systems for the process of entering the country, so they had to work intermittently, which makes it necessary to do this task manually and due to the influx high number of passengers, entry was delayed,” the AICM posted on social media.
Flores added that once the Telmex system detected the fault, specialist technicians came to the site to carry out the repairs. The problem started at 6:00 a.m. and was restored at noon.
According to Flight Tracker, at least 120 flights were delayed and 28 canceled due to the attempted cable theft.
