E-gates back online after chaos at Heathrow and other UK airports

The e-gates failure that left thousands of passengers queueing at UK airports has been resolved, the Home Office has said while ruling out a cyber-attack as a cause.

Airports said passengers could expect to travel smoothly again on Wednesday after widespread delays on Tuesday evening owing 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.

Border officials were left to manually process all travellers instead. Pictures shared on social media showed long queues forming at passport control at several airports.

A Home Office spokesperson said on Wednesday: “E-gates at UK airports came back online shortly after midnight.

“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.” Heathrow airport’s X account also confirmed soon after midnight that systems were running as usual.

Manchester airport said a dedicated team and customer services staff were supporting passengers while UK Border Force fixed the problem.

Among delayed passengers were Sam Morter, 32, who arrived at Heathrow from Sri Lanka, said it was “pandemonium” when he got to passport control in Terminal 3, where all of the E-gates had blank screens.

He told the PA news agency: “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.”

Another affected traveller 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.”

There are 270 automated gates in total at 15 air and rail ports in the UK, using facial recognition to allow people to enter the country.

Passengers were already facing disrupted journeys to and from airports owing to industrial action affecting train services across the UK throughout this week until Saturday.

Border Force workers also staged a four-day strike at Heathrow in a dispute over working conditions last week.