Travellers faced disruption across the country due to a “nationwide issue” with Border Force e-gates at airports on Tuesday night.
Airports including Heathrow, Gatwick, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Bristol, Newcastle and Manchester were affected 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.”
eGates at UK airports came back online shortly after midnight(Image: Getty Images)
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.”
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 Government’s website, there are 270 of them in total at 15 air and rail ports in the UK.
