Airports across the UK, including London Stansted, Newcastle, Birmingham, Manchester, Aberdeen, Glasgow and Bristol, as well as London Heathrow and London Gatwick had their border force operations severely disrupted on Tuesday 7 May, after an issue arose related to e-gates at passport control, which was reportedly due to a technical outage.
According to one report, the Border Force security database – called ‘Border Crossing’ was installed under three years ago to the tune of £372 million. Without access to the IT system, the passport check kiosks cannot function, so officers are having to check passports manually against back-up databases.
A spokesperson at Heathrow said: “Border Force is currently experiencing a nationwide issue which is impacting passengers being processed through the border.”
The airport’s teams have been working with Border Force with their contingency plans to help resolve the problem as quickly as possible and are on hand to provide passenger welfare.
Manchester Airport issued a similar statement saying it was aware of an issue UK Border Force’s systems affecting a significant number of airports.
“Our Resilience Team and customer services colleagues are supporting passengers while UK Border Force fixes the issue.”
Both Stansted and Gatwick have also stated the issue is related to e-gates at passport control, while Bristol Airport said on X it had been affected by the issue and warned passengers that e-Gates are not available with wait times longer than usual.
Meanwhile, Glasgow Airport said in a post on social media: “Passengers arriving back on international flights within the next few hours may experience longer than usual waiting times at the border. This is due to a nationwide Border Force issue.”
One passenger, Nathan Lane, who was stuck at Heathrow, told ITV News the staff “really seem to be having a meltdown. “It seemed to be happening right when we landed and were yelling and all the e-gates were down – so immediately it was clear something was happening.”
It’s not the first time e-gates across the UK have experienced a malfunction. At the end of May, 2023 there were similar problems with e-gates that took a day to resolve. And in August of last year the country’s air traffic system also suffered the impact of a technical problem, which lasted for several hours.
** Update: The Home Office issued a statement on 8 May confirming that the “nationwide issue” which caused huge delays at passport e-gates for airports across the country has been resolved and the glitch in the border control systems was not due to a cyber attack.
A spokesperson said the gates were restored shortly after midnight, four hours after they initially failed. “As soon as engineers detected a wider system network issue at 7.44 pm last night, a large scale contingency response was activated within minutes… At no point was border security compromised and there is no indication of malicious cyber activity.”
