CargoWise customs messaging delays stall UK and Japan clearance filings for nearly 22 hours

WiseTech took almost 22 hours to fully clear a backlog in CargoWise customs messaging that disrupted UK and Japanese import declarations for most of a working day. Customer notifications seen by The Loadstar, spanning 28 October, show the software provider acknowledged the problem at 10.37am and confirmed full recovery at 8.33am the following morning.

The fault hit message responses across the platform, with WiseTech confirming at 11.24am 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, leaving customers waiting and staff with little to tell them.

How did the outage unfold?

The timeline, reconstructed from customer notifications, shows a day-long effort by WiseTech's engineers:

• 10.37am, 28 October – WiseTech acknowledges an issue affecting message responses.
• 11.24am – GB and Japan customs messaging confirmed as "particularly impacted".
• 12.04pm and 2.07pm – Updates report engineers working on mitigation; the senior eServices team investigates backlogs.
• 3.51pm – Backlogs described as "processing slowly".
• 8.47pm – Most queues processed, teams still "engaged on the core issue".
• 8.33am, 29 October – Backlog fully processed and messaging services recovered, with monitoring to continue.

The notifications span almost 22 hours between acknowledgement and recovery confirmation, although they do not establish how long individual customers were affected. Neither the number of users impacted nor the root cause is yet clear; The Loadstar has asked WiseTech Global to comment.

What did it mean for forwarders and shippers?

For forwarders, the immediate commercial problem was not the technology itself but the silence around it. Customers of the affected UK forwarder were "waiting and complaining" while the business had "very little" it could tell them about when normal service would resume, according to the source.

Customs entries could not be processed in the normal way for a large part of the working day, meaning shipments dependent on clearance faced potential delay at the border without any firm timeline for resolution. Instructed not to resubmit messages awaiting replies, forwarders had no workaround: WiseTech warned that resubmission would worsen the backlog and could cause confusing rejections once both messages were eventually delivered.

Was the escalation process good enough?

The forwarder, who followed the established reporting route, criticised the support and escalation process for providing little actionable information as complaints mounted. The concern was less about the outage itself and more about the response architecture around it.

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

That question now falls to WiseTech. CargoWise sits at the centre of customs and forwarding operations for thousands of logistics businesses, and messaging queues that stall for hours translate directly into delayed clearance and frustrated shippers.

Is this the first recent CargoWise failure?

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 significant incidents within roughly four months will sharpen scrutiny of the platform's resilience, and the forwarder's complaint about communication suggests customers will expect a clearer escalation framework alongside the technical fix. With WiseTech's teams still working on the underlying issue and monitoring continuing after recovery, further detail on the root cause will determine whether this was an isolated fault or a recurring structural weakness.