Passengers stranded across UK airports as e-gates shut down

Long queues on Tuesday stretched across airports in the United Kingdom (UK) after the country’s border force system was hit by a nationwide glitch.

Pictures on social media showed enormous queues in front of the gates at Heathrow, Edinburgh, and Manchester on Tuesday evening as thousands waited for their passports to be checked.

Computer outage at Heathrow border control. A few thousand people in line and not a single person at Heathrow is able to figure out a solution. This pic is just those in front of me, about twice as many behind me. pic.twitter.com/3pDkZmkHNm

— Dheeraj Chintala (@dheerajcr) May 7, 2024

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Responding to the situation, Heathrow confirmed that the border force was experiencing a nationwide issue that impacted passengers being processed through the border.

The airport apologised for the inconvenience, saying its teams were supporting border forces with their contingency plans to help resolve the problem as quickly as possible.

The disruption comes after border force workers staged a four-day strike at Heathrow in a dispute over working conditions last week.

The union said the workers were protesting against plans to introduce new rosters, which they claimed would see around 250 of them forced out of their jobs at passport control.

“We are aware of a technical issue affecting e-Gates across the country,” a home office spokesperson said.

“We are working closely with Border Force and affected airports to resolve the issue as soon as possible and apologise to all passengers for the inconvenience caused.”

In May last year, there were similar problems with e-gates, which took a day to resolve.

Airport officials resorted to checking passports manually.