The CAPE portal’s launch on April 20, 2026 was highly anticipated, but the first day brought a series of technical challenges that frustrated some early filers. Here’s what was reported and what CBP has said in response.
Login and Authentication Issues
Many users reported difficulty logging into the CAPE section of ACE during the morning hours of April 20. CBP’s ACE infrastructure, which handles millions of daily transactions across the entire customs system, appeared to experience elevated load due to the concentrated interest in CAPE access.
CBP confirmed that it had implemented additional server capacity for the launch but acknowledged that the volume of concurrent logins exceeded projections. Users who encountered login errors were advised to retry after 15–30 minutes, and most reported success in accessing the portal by midday.
CSV Upload Errors
The most commonly reported technical issue was CSV upload errors. Several customs brokers reported that files that appeared to be formatted correctly were rejected at upload with non-specific error messages. Investigation revealed several causes:
Encoding issues. Some files generated by older versions of Excel were saved with Windows-1252 encoding rather than UTF-8. CBP’s system requires UTF-8. Opening the file in a text editor and re-saving as UTF-8 resolved the issue for most affected filers.
Column header case sensitivity. CBP’s CSV parser was case-sensitive for column headers. Importers who modified the template’s column headers (e.g., changing “entry_date” to “Entry Date” or “EntryDate”) received rejections. The fix: use CBP’s template exactly as provided.
Extra whitespace. Several submissions had trailing spaces in the entry number column that caused lookup failures against CBP’s entry records. Standard data-cleaning practice — trimming whitespace from all fields — resolved this.
Entry Lookup Failures
A portion of early submissions contained entry numbers that CBP’s system could not match to records. This was not always a filer error — in some cases, CBP’s own records appeared to have been affected by data migration issues, and CBP indicated it was investigating a small percentage of entries that should match but did not.
For entries that CBP cannot verify, the agency has committed to manual review rather than automatic rejection. Importers were advised to keep their 7501 documentation and be prepared to provide it if CBP requests supplemental information.
What Worked Well
Despite the first-day friction, many filers reported successful submissions once the morning login surge subsided. Submissions with clean, well-formatted CSV files and straightforward entries were acknowledged without issue. Several customs brokers reported successfully submitting large claim packages (hundreds of entries) in the afternoon.
CBP’s Response
CBP issued an advisory through its Port Messaging system the evening of April 20, acknowledging the technical issues and providing specific guidance on the UTF-8 encoding and column header requirements. The agency indicated that the technical issues were being resolved and encouraged filers who encountered problems to resubmit.
Our Recommendation
If you encountered submission issues on launch day, do not wait. Review your CSV for the common errors identified above, make necessary corrections, and resubmit. The earlier you get a clean submission into CBP’s queue, the earlier your refund will be processed.