A Border Force systems outage that caused nationwide disruptions in several UK airports has been resolved, the Home Office has confirmed.
Inbound passengers waited in long queues, as chaos unravelled at Britain’s busiest airports on Tuesday night.
The e-gate system, meant to speed up passengers through passport checks, failed for the second time in two weeks.
The Home Office said, in a statement, on Wednesday that e-gates at UK airports came back online shortly after midnight.
“As soon as engineers detected a wider system network issue at 7:44 p.m. 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,” a Home Office spokesperson said.
The Home Office apologised to travellers for the disruption to their journeys.
Heathrow Airport said in the early hours of Wednesday that all systems were running as usual.
Frustrated Passengers
Other airports, affected by the outage, included Gatwick, Stansted, Manchester, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Bristol and Newcastle. According to the Home Office, there are 270 e-gates at 15 air and rail ports in the UK.Passengers with biometric passports, and over the age of 10, can use the e-gates for “quicker travel into the UK.” Widespread disruption led to frustration of passengers, who had to queue for hours at the border checks, many returning to the UK from extended Bank holiday breaks.
George Papadopoulos, a passenger who flew to London from Athens on Tuesday evening, told The Epoch Times that airport staff couldn’t effectively provide updates on the waiting time.
“We flew in to terminal 2 but they had to reroute us to terminal 4 because of how congested the airport was. Airport staff separated passengers in different groups in an attempt to speed up the process. However, we were left waiting for hours with no idea as to when the situation will get resolved,” Mr. Papadopoulos said.
He added that passengers on his flight had to first wait inside the airplane for 40 minutes, after they were told that the landing crew was not prepared.
“When I arrived to the border control at 10 p.m., some people had been there for three hours already. Some passengers started shouting in frustration, demanding to know how long the wait will be. Someone said ‘at least give us water,’ because if you didn’t happen to queue next to a vending machine, it was not easy to get water or snacks,” Mr. Papadopoulos said.
Network Failures
Last year, the e-gate system failure similarly left thousands of passengers stranded before the issue was resolved. The Home Office had explained the problem was an IT issue.The end of summer 2023 marked another disruption for travellers after a “network-wide failure” hit the UK air traffic control system. Hundreds of flights were cancelled causing travel chaos on August 28—one of the busiest days of the year.
The failure of the air traffic control system meant that the UK was not able to automatically process flight plans, which had to be processed manually instead. This slowed down the operations and restricted the traffic flow to ensure safety.
The e-gate system outage comes following a four-day strike at Heathrow by Border Force in a dispute over working conditions. Last week, more than 300 members of the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) staged a walkout.
The protest was prompted by plans to introduce rosters that workers claimed would force about 250 people out of jobs at passport control.
