A “nationwide issue” which caused huge delays at passport e-gates has been resolved, the Home Office has said.
Major UK airports including Manchester, Newcastle and Edinburgh London all confirmed a Border Force problem was causing delays with arrivals late on Tuesday and pictures and videos on social media showing long queues and chaotic scenes at airports.
E-gates are automated gates that use facial recognition to check a person’s identity and allow them to enter the country without talking to a Border Force officer.
There are more than 270 of them in place at 15 air and rail ports in the UK, according to the .gov website, which also says they are supposed to “enable quicker travel into the UK”.
Due to the outage, staff were left manually processing passengers instead.
The Home Office, which oversees Border Force, said in a statement this morning: “eGates at UK airports came back online shortly after midnight.”
A spokesperson for the Home Office said the problems were caused by a “system network issue” and were first reported around 8pm last night.
The statement added that “at no point was border security compromised, and there is no indication of malicious cyber activity”.
It also extended apologies to “travellers caught up in disruption” and thanked “partners, including airlines for their co-operation and support” during the outage.
The exact cause of the problem remains unclear, but does not appear to be restricted to e-gates – Belfast International Airport, which does not have them, said the Border Force “systems” had been impacted.
By Wednesday morning, most flights at airports across the UK were shown to be departing and arriving on time. British Airways tweeted this morning that the issue was now “resolved”:
Although as of lunchtime the only major Northern airport to go public in agreement was Edinburgh:
The latest governmental IT problem followed hot on the heels of a cyberattack on the Ministry of Defence‘s payroll systems, which PM Rishi Sunak and Defence Secretary Grant Shapps blamed on a “malign actor” with possible state backi
