Passport e-gates back online after outage causes delays at UK airports

BBC News - Michael Race & Katy Austin

08 May 2024

A "nationwide issue" which caused huge delays at passport e-gates has been resolved, the Home Office has said.

Major UK airports including Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and Edinburgh all confirmed a Border Force problem was causing delays with arrivals late on Tuesday.

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 government's 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 early on Wednesday: "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 19:50BST, meaning the issues persisted for more than four hours.

They added that "at no point was border security compromised, and there is no indication of malicious cyber activity".

[Read more: Passport e-gates back online after outage causes delays at UK airports - BBC News]