Mexico City, Mexico — A technical failure at the Mexico City International Airport Wednesday was due to attempted cable theft. On Wednesday morning, hundreds of passengers were affected by the technical failure that was felt in the airport’s immigration department.
Passengers in and out of Terminal 2 were delayed since immigration agents were unable to electronically review 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 in the morning.
On Wednesday, authorities reported that after a remote review, it was determined that an attempted cable theft in the vicinity of the Mexico City International Airport (AICM) damaged the fiber optics.
“We have a record that this Wednesday morning, a group of people tried to steal the underground wiring thinking that it was copper cable, but that wiring was fiber optic, which ended up breaking and causing the failures reported 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 operate intermittently, which makes it necessary to do this task manually and due to the high influx of passengers, entry was delayed,” the AICM posted on social media.
Flores added that once the Telmex system detected the failure, specialized technicians went to the site to make the repairs. The problem began at 6:00 a.m. and was restored by noon.
According to Flight Tracker, at least 120 flights were delayed and 28 canceled due to the attempted cable theft.