A “nationwide issue” with Border Force e-gates that caused significant disruption at airports across the UK has been resolved, the British Home Office has confirmed.
Airports including Heathrow, Gatwick, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Bristol, Newcastle and Manchester were impacted by the failure on Tuesday evening.
Border officials were left to manually process travellers instead, with images and footage shared on social media showing long queues forming at passport control at several airports.
A Home Office spokesperson said in a statement early on Wednesday: “eGates at UK airports came back online shortly after midnight.
“As soon as engineers detected a wider system network issue at 7.44pm last night, a large scale contingency response was activated within six minutes.
“At no point was border security compromised, and there is no indication of malicious cyber activity.”
The spokesperson apologised to travellers caught up in disruption.
Paul Curievici, from Haslemere in Surrey, landed at Gatwick Airport at around 7.30pm on a flight from Lyon and waited in line for almost an hour at passport control.
The 41-year-old told the PA news agency: “(I was) a little bit resigned at what initially looked like another British infrastructure failing, and (I had) quite a lot of sympathy for the poor buggers furrowing their brows and trying not to look embarrassed.”
Mr Curievici said the e-gates at Gatwick had since reopened but that fast-track passengers continued to be prioritised, which he found “pretty galling”.
He continued: “There was an awkward moment – half of us had been funnelled into the ‘all passports’ queue.
“When the system came back online they reopened almost all the UK/EU gates without opening any for us – I actually raised it with a member of staff and they finally opened one.”
Sam Morter, 32, who arrived at Heathrow from Sri Lanka, said it was “pandemonium” when he got to passport control in Terminal 3, where all of the e-gates had blank screens.
He told PA: “There was a lot of Border Force officials running and scrambling around. Four or five went to man the posts and start processing the UK passports manually.
“But at the same time, hundreds of passengers started to flood into passport control, so it all of a sudden became chaotic and they couldn’t cope with the number of the people coming in.
“We weren’t given any information. There was no information on the Tannoys or from staff.”
E-gates are automated border gates that use facial recognition to check the identity of a person in order to let them enter the UK without talking to a Border Force officer.
According to the UK government’s website, there are 270 of them in total at 15 air and rail ports in the UK.
They were designed to “enable quicker travel into the UK”.
The disruption came after Border Force workers staged a four-day strike at Heathrow in a dispute over working conditions last week.
The union said the workers were protesting against plans to introduce new rosters they claim will see around 250 of them forced out of their jobs at passport control.
