Home Office resolves Border Force E-Gate System Outage
According to the Home Office, UK border security was not compromised during the e-gate system outage.
The Home Office has confirmed that a Border Force systems outage that caused disruptions in UK airports has been resolved.
Passengers faced chaos and long queues at Britain’s busiest airports on Tuesday night due to the failure of the e-gate system, which is designed to expedite passport checks.
The Home Office stated on Wednesday that the e-gates at UK airports were back online shortly after midnight, following a system network issue detected at 7:44 p.m. the previous night.
The Home Office spokesperson emphasized that at no point was border security compromised and there was no indication of malicious cyber activity.
Heathrow Airport also confirmed that all systems were operating normally in the early hours of Wednesday.
Affected airports included Gatwick, Stansted, Manchester, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Bristol, and Newcastle, with 270 e-gates at 15 air and rail ports in the UK.
Passengers with biometric passports over the age of 10 can utilize the e-gates for faster entry into the UK, but the recent disruption led to frustration among travelers who had to endure lengthy queues at border checks.
One passenger, George Papadopoulos, shared his experience of waiting for hours at the airport without receiving timely updates on the situation.
The recent e-gate system outage follows a similar incident last year that left passengers stranded before being resolved, attributed to an IT issue.
Additionally, a recent network-wide failure at the UK air traffic control system caused hundreds of flight cancellations and travel chaos on a busy day in August.
Prior to the e-gate system outage, a four-day strike at Heathrow by Border Force workers over working conditions and job security had already disrupted operations.
