East Midlands Airport operating 'as normal' following issues with electronic passport gates
East Midlands Airport is once again operating as normal following an issue with the electronic passport gates. On Tuesday, April 7, the airport was one of many impacted by the issue, with Manchester and Heathrow also experiencing issues.
At around 9:15pm, the airport shared on X, formerly known as Twitter, "UK Border Force is experiencing nationwide issues affecting eGates at a number of airports, including East Midlands. Our teams are supporting UK Border Force staff to minimise disruption to passengers while they fix the problem.
"We apologise for any inconvenience caused during this time and thank you for your patience and understanding." It has now been confirmed that the airport is operating as normal following minimal disruption.
A spokesperson for East Midlands Airport said: "Following last night’s outage affecting border force systems, passport control is operating as normal today."
E-gates are in force at just 15 air and rail ports in the UK, the government website says. There are 270 of them altogether. They work with modern biometric passports by using facial recognition technology to check a person's identity against the photo in their passport.
Since their introduction, they have streamlined passport checks and arrivals into countries. But this is not the first time problems have been reported with them - they failed just two weeks ago around April 25 and on May 27 last year, similar nationwide problems were reported.