Thousands of passengers were left stuck in long queues after passport e-gates at major UK airports suffered a nationwide outage on May 7, 2024.
According to the UK Home Office, a wider system network issue was detected at 19:44 local time and a “large scale” contingency response was activated within six minutes. All e-gates were back online shortly after midnight.
The Home Office also said there was “no indication” of malicious activity behind the outage and border security was not compromised.
E-gates use facial recognition to check a traveler’s identity and allow them to enter the country without having to be processed or spoken to by a Border Force officer.
During the outage, airport staff resorted to manually processing passengers. The incident came at a peak travel period with many travelers returning home from a long weekend.
A number of passengers took to social media to upload photographs and video footage of the almost-five hour ordeal and the chaos experienced at airports across the country.
Airports affected by the outage were London-Heathrow Airport (LHR), London-Gatwick Airport (LGW), London-Stansted Airport (STN), Edinburgh Airport (EDI), Birmingham Airport (BHX), Manchester Airport (MAN) and Bristol Airport (BRS).