E-gates ‘back online’ after chaos at Heathrow and other UK airports
Passengers experienced delays at a number of UK airports on Tuesday due to a nationwide technical outage affecting UK Border Force e-gates.
Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Manchester and Bristol airports all confirmed problems with passengers being processed through the border on Tuesday evening.
In the early hours of Wednesday morning, the Home Office announced that e-gates came back online shortly after midnight. At the same time, Heathrow airport’s Twitter/X account said: “Following the Border Force national outage yesterday evening, all systems are now running as usual. Passengers can expect to travel through Heathrow smoothly. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.”
The Home Office said a “system network” problem brought the e-gates down at 7.44pm on Tuesday. There was no indication of malicious cyber activity and border security was not compromised at any point, the Home Office added.
Earlier, footage posted on social media showed large queues of passengers waiting at passport control. Manchester airport said a dedicated team and customer services staff were supporting passengers while UK Border Force fixes the problem. The hub wrote on X: “UK Border Force is experiencing nationwide issues affecting eGates at a number of airports, including Manchester.
Our teams are supporting UK Border Force staff to minimise disruption to passengers while they fix the problem.”
Passengers were already facing disrupted journeys to and from airports due to industrial action affecting train services across the UK throughout this week until Saturday.
Gatwick earlier said there would be limited or cancelled train services to and from the airport in Sussex and advised people to plan their journey in advance and leave additional time.
One person affected wrote on X: “Long queues at Heathrow airport where passengers are being held at arrivals for a system failure. Been here already 1 hour and the queue is only getting bigger. No communication given to anyone on what is the timeframe to sort this out.”
Another person posted video footage of the chaos and wrote: “No e-gates working. This is the current queue in Gatwick airport with lots of children and no water.”
One X user at Heathrow wrote: “Been stood here over an hour! My taxi has cancelled and at this rate I’ll be too late for a train.” Another wrote: “My daughter has been waiting in a queue for over 2 hours now after a 12-hour flight.”