Passport e-gates fail at Heathrow, Gatwick and Manchester airports

The Home Office has confirmed a “nationwide issue” with Border Force e-gates that caused huge queues at airports across the country has been resolved.

The breakdown came less than two weeks after the last UK-wide failure, heaping pressure on the Home Office to explain why the technology is so unreliable.

A Home Office spokesperson said in a statement early on Wednesday: “E-gates 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.”

Passengers arriving back after extended bank holiday breaks reported being stuck in bottlenecks at the border.

Thousands of arrivals at Heathrow, the UK’s busiest airport, were delayed, with passengers waiting in queues for up to two hours. There were also long delays at Stansted, Manchester and Edinburgh airports, and delays of 90 minutes were reported at Gatwick.

Justin Bronk, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, was among those queuing at Heathrow.

He wrote on Twitter/X: “Stuck with thousands at Heathrow T5 as all the e-gates are down. Apparently a nationwide system outage.

“You see how high-capacity the system normally is by how rapidly things turn to chaos when it breaks; plane after plane of people pouring in and backing up in the corridor.”

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A spokesman for the airport said: “Border Force is currently experiencing a nationwide issue which is impacting passengers being processed through the border.

“Our teams are supporting [them] with their contingency plans to help resolve the problem as quickly as possible and are on hand to provide passenger welfare. We apologise for any impact this is having to passenger journeys.”

There are more than 270 e-gates in place at 15 airports and train stations in the UK that were all understood to failed. The cause of the issue was unclear.

The Home Office apologised last month following the failure on April 25, which it blamed on a “technical issue”.

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E-gates usually process the vast majority of passengers, including children aged ten and over, arriving in the UK.

They were originally restricted to British and European Union arrivals, but over the years their use has been extended to include arrivals from Australia, Canada, Iceland, Japan, Liechtenstein, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland and the US.

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The e-gates have failed on several occasions in recent years. The whole system collapsed at the start of the late May bank holiday weekend in 2023 because of a failed system upgrade, resulting in four-hour queues at airports. In 2021 technical issues caused the gates to fail three times in two months.

In January, The Times revealed that the Border Force has drawn up plans to create an “intelligent border” with new e-gates that are capable of allowing arrivals into the country using only advanced facial recognition.

Phil Douglas, the director-general of Border Force, said that the plans have been designed to bring Britain’s border up to a gold standard that has been developed overseas.

Trials of the new technology are expected to begin at airports later this year before the launch of a full procurement process for new gates.

A Home Office spokeswoman said: “We are aware of a technical issue affecting e-gates across the country.

“We are working closely with Border Force and affected airports to resolve the issue as soon as possible and apologise to all passengers for the inconvenience caused.”