CargoWise customs messaging backlog clears after 22-hour disruption

CargoWise users processing British and Japanese customs declarations lost most of a working day this week to messaging delays that took almost 22 hours from acknowledgement to full recovery.

WiseTech Global, the Australian developer of the CargoWise freight management platform, first acknowledged a problem affecting message responses at 10.37am on 28 October, according to customer notifications seen by The Loadstar. By 11.24am the company confirmed that GB and Japan customs messaging were "particularly impacted".

One UK forwarder said the disruption prevented its team from processing customs entries normally for much of the day. Customers waited without a timeline for restoration while staff had little to tell them.

The forwarder said its biggest concern was the effect on customers, who were "waiting and complaining", adding: "While operationally, we had very little we could tell them about when normal service would resume."

What does the outage change for forwarders?

For licensed customs brokers and forwarders, a stalled messaging queue means declarations cannot be lodged, and goods cannot clear at the border. WiseTech instructed customers not to resubmit messages awaiting replies, warning that duplicate submissions would worsen the backlog and could trigger confusing rejections once both messages were delivered.

The incident timeline, reconstructed from the notifications:

• 10.37am, 28 October — WiseTech acknowledges an issue affecting message responses; its senior eServices team begins investigating backlogs.
• 11.24am — GB and Japan customs messaging identified as "particularly impacted".
• 12.04pm and 2.07pm — Engineers work on mitigation.
• 3.51pm — Backlogs reported as "processing slowly".
• 8.47pm — Backlog across most queues processed; teams remain "engaged on the core issue".
• 8.33am, 29 October — Backlog fully processed and messaging services recovered; monitoring continues.

The notifications span almost 22 hours between acknowledgement and recovery confirmation. They do not establish how long individual customers were affected. The number of users impacted and the root cause remain unclear. WiseTech Global has been asked to comment.

Escalation process under scrutiny

The forwarder criticised WiseTech's support and escalation process, saying its team had followed the established reporting route but received little actionable information as customer complaints mounted.

"My concern isn't that a system outage happened, as clearly there will be occasions outside our control," the source said. "It's whether we have a strong enough escalation and communication process when it does happen."

The criticism goes to a structural question for the logistics sector: CargoWise functions as core back-office infrastructure for thousands of forwarders and brokers, so its incident communication cadence effectively sets the information forwarders can pass to importers and exporters during a disruption.

Second incident in five months

The disruption follows a separate CargoWise outage reported by The Loadstar in June, when customers in several countries experienced log-in failures and electronic messaging problems. WiseTech subsequently attributed that incident to a faulty data update.

Two messaging incidents within five months, in a platform that handles customs declarations across multiple jurisdictions, will sharpen customer attention on WiseTech's resilience engineering and its incident-response protocols. The company has confirmed recovery but says teams continue to address the underlying issue, and an explanation of the root cause will determine whether this week's backlog was an isolated fault or a recurring pattern.