The Home Office has announced that a "nationwide issue" that was causing significant delays at passport e-gates has been fixed.
Airports, including Heathrow, Gatwick, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Bristol, Newcastle, and Manchester all acknowledged late night that arrival delays were being caused by a Border Force issue. Social media posts with images and videos showed lengthy queues.
According to a traveller, the passport control line took him longer than the flight from Lisbon.
E-gates are automated gates that verify an individual's identity through facial recognition technology, enabling them to enter the nation without needing to speak with a Border Force agent.
According to the government website, there are more than 270 of them in operation at 15 UK rail and air ports, and they are intended to "enable quicker travel into the UK."
Staff members were forced to manually process passengers as a result of their outage.
"eGates at UK airports came back online shortly after midnight," according to a statement released early on Wednesday by the Home Office, which is in charge of Border Force.
According to a Home Office representative, the issues were first reported at 19:50BST, which means they lasted for more than four hours. The problems were attributed to a "system network issue."
"At no point was border security compromised, and there is no indication of malicious cyber activity," they continued.
They thanked "partners, including airlines, for their cooperation and support" during the outage and apologized to "travellers caught up in the disruption".
The Border Force "systems" had been affected, according to Belfast International Airport, which does not have e-gates, so the issue did not seem to be limited to the gates themselves.
At Heathrow, a traveller reported that passport holders were being hastily processed manually by border officials.
Sam Morter, 32, who was returning from a holiday in Sri Lanka, said, "There were just a lot of chaotic scenes, and all the e-gates were totally blank."
It took him around 90 minutes, he said, to get through the airport.
Julian, who had flown in from Lisbon, remarked, "I've spent longer in the terminal than I did in the air," while Samira, who had arrived from Spain, claimed that "everyone was arguing" and that "people were distressed."
One of the first individuals impacted was Dennis Marsh, who claimed to have witnessed the e-gates turn from green to red.
"Remember, it wasn't just e-gates. Every manual verification method also failed," he claimed. "We were extremely fortunate to be at the front and were given water. It wasn't too bad—we waited for about 40 minutes—but thousands of people were arriving behind us."
Manchester Airport announced that it will also waive any excess fees for customers who are delayed in leaving parking lots due to the issues.
The automated e-gates in the UK have malfunctioned before, also. An IT problem affected airports in May 2023.
Furthermore, the National Air Traffic Services system that was supposed to process flight plans automatically failed in August of last year, leaving passengers stranded and forcing the cancellation of about 2,000 flights at airports throughout the United Kingdom.
