Government issues statement after chaos at Manchester Airport

The government has issued a statement after a nationwide outage caused chaos at Manchester Airport this week. Airports across the country were affected by the issue with eGates which resulted in huge queues forming at passport control on Thursday (April 25).

One passenger arriving at Manchester Airport said he waited an hour and 20 minutes to get through passport control at Terminal 3. Tom Amos, who was flying back from Alicante, told the Manchester Evening News that the queue was snaking up three corridors.

He criticised the lack of communication by Manchester Airport, telling the M.E.N. that passengers were not aware of the issue until they had been queuing for half an hour. Manchester Airport apologised to passengers for the inconvenience caused by the outage.

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Another passenger reported issues with the passport scanners at departures too. Rita Stuart, who was flying to Turkey, was turned away and told to come back later after trying to get through security less than three hours before her flight was due to take off.

She told the M.E.N. that other passengers were also struggling to scan their passports. She said: "People were quite irate'.

The UK-wide issue was first reported by Edinburgh Airport on Thursday afternoon (April 25), according to the Express. Heathrow Airport, London Gatwick, Birmingham Airport, London Luton and Stansted were among the major airports seeing long queues.

However, Liverpool Airport told the Express that it was not impacted by nationwide outage which affected eGates as it does not have any. There are more than 270 eGates - electronic gates which are automated - at 15 airports and Eurostar terminals in the UK.

eGates use facial recognition technology to check passengers' identities against the photo in their passport. They are supposed to offer a quicker way of crossing the border, but due to a nationwide outage, passengers faced long waits on Thursday (April 25).

Shortly after 7pm, Manchester Airport said that the issue affecting eGates had been resolved. In a statement on X, formerly Twitter, the airport said: "We apologise for any inconvenience caused during this period and thank you for your patience and understanding."

The Home Office has said that security at the border was not affected by outage. In a statement on Friday (April 26), a Home Office spokesperson said: "Yesterday [April 25] a technical issue affected eGates across the country. The issue was quickly identified and has now been resolved. We have comprehensively reviewed the causes and will ensure this issue does not occur again.”