UK airports hit by 'pandemonium' after passport e-gate breakdown - 'nationwide issue' now resolved

UK airports were hit with chaos and long queues after passport e-gates broke down across the country yesterday evening.

Airports such as Gatwick, Heathrow, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Bristol, Newcastle and Manchester were among those impacted by the outage. As a result of the disabled e-gates, which are used at the UK border to process passports, Border officials were forced to manually process travellers meaning that long queues quickly formed.

On Wednesday morning, the Home Office confirmed that the systems were back online and apologised to those impacted by the delays. A spokesperson for the department said: “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.”

Paul Curievici, a traveller from Haslemere in Surrey who landed at Gatwick Airport from Lyon on Tuesday evening, queued for almost an hour before making it through the UK border. He said: “(I was) a little bit resigned at what initially looked like another British infrastructure failing, and (I had) quite a lot of sympathy for the poor buggers furrowing their brows and trying not to look embarrassed.”

Another traveller, Sam Morter, 32, who arrived at Heathrow from Sri Lanka, described the scenes at Heathrow as “pandemonium”. He said: “There was a lot of Border Force officials running and scrambling around. Four or five went to man the posts and start processing the UK passports manually.

“But at the same time, hundreds of passengers started to flood into passport control, so it all of a sudden became chaotic and they couldn’t cope with the number of the people coming in. We weren’t given any information. There was no information on the tannoys or from staff.”