Flights into Britain face delays after passport IT system collapsed

The UK airport chaos continued into a second day last night with more queues as border staff had to process people manually after the passport IT system collapsed nationwide.

Thousands of fed-up passengers were left stranded in Britain’s airportsafter e-gates in arrivals halls failed to open. 

Disastrous scenes saw disgruntled travellers crowded into small corridors as they waited to have their ID records checked, while flustered members of staff frantically handed out water.

Meanwhile planes due to take off and fly into the UK were grounded amid the chaos. Passengers in Girona were told their Ryanair jet was being held in Spain due to the gates disaster at its intended destination airport Stansted. 

The ‘major, major incident’ appears to have been caused by the Border Force’s security database called ‘Border Crossing’ which was introduced three years ago, costing the taxpayer £372million.

Just after 2.10am this morning Home Office said it had finally fixed the system and had no evidence its outage had been caused by a cyber attack. But the queues were still enormous and will take time to clear.

If Border Crossing is shut down, e-gates cannot function, so Border Force staff had to check passports manually against back-up databases, checking travellers’ names against terrorism records, the Police National Computer and immigration records.

‘Clearly this is a major, major incident because you don’t expect this system to go down for any length of time across the board,’ a source said before the problem was fixed.

Were you caught up in the queues? E-mail: [email protected] 

‘The involvement of major airports in different parts of the country, from Gatwick to Manchester, suggests this is a nationwide system crash.

‘If both Border Crossing and the back-up system are affected it would mean issuing laptops to officers on the PCP [primary control point], which will slow things down even further.’

The unprecedented situation engulfed airports across the country, with photos shared on social media showing enormous lines of passengers in front of the gates at airports like Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton, Edinburgh and Manchester. 

While some of the e-gates appeared to be coming back online overnight – for example at Heathrow – other passengers were bracing for queues lasting hours.

Footage shared on social media shows the moment the e-gates reopened at Heathrow, with passengers smiling and clapping as the first people enter the automated passport control cubicles. 

The system outage also impacted flights due to land in the UK last night. 

Jenny Coxall was due to fly to Stansted on a Ryanair flight from the Spanish city of Girona, but she said her flight was ‘being held [there] because of the Border Force gates outage’.

‘It looks like we are in for a very long night,’ Jenny told MailOnline last night around 11pm. ‘We’ve been sat on the plane for 80 minutes. We are hopefully taking off soon but I’m not looking forward to the other end.’

She said she had already been notified about the Border Force delays in the Ryanair app, with the airline telling passengers they would likely have to ‘remain onboard the aircraft for a short period of time until the passport control area is less crowded’ once they land in the UK.

Passengers were also prevented from disembarking dozens of aircraft after landing at Heathrow last night, it is understood.

They were unable to leave the planes because of the crisis unfolding in the terminals, where thousands of passengers were queueing in corridors and in the arrivals halls.

The crash appeared to have been caused by a failure in the official government wi-fi network which provides secure real-time updates to the security systems, insiders said.

The Border Crossing security database has also collapsed, it was confirmed. ‘The secure wi-fi has gone down which means the systems can’t update,’ the source said. 

‘They rely on wi-fi for notifications of someone who is known to be travelling to Britain who needs to be stopped, for whatever reason. Without those updates the egates can’t keep up to date with real-time security issues.’

Harriet Terry, who is stuck in the queue at Heathrow, told MailOnline around 8pm last night that she had been waiting in line for more than an hour and that airport staff had started handing out water.

She said that people were told that the airport was working on a contingency to check passenger’s documents.

Fraser, an IT worker from Colchester, was caught up in the chaos as he returned to Stansted following a trip to Barcelona.

He told MailOnline last night: ‘There was no hint of any issues when we landed, getting off the plane or arriving to where border force was. But then there was a massive scrum of people and we could see the e-gates were not working.

‘They then announced that due to a computer issue the e-gates were not working so they had to adopt manual desks.

‘The problem is there are hundreds of people here winding back and forward in the lanes waiting to get someone to check their passports.

‘There are obviously still planes landing coming through making their way to the same pinchpoint.

‘People are being typically British and taking it on the chin. There has been a few shouts and comments when they made announcements over the tannoys. It’s not a great welcome back to the UK for Brits or people coming to our country.

‘I have Italian tourists and German people behind me and I wonder what they think as they arrive into the UK.

‘They seem that they are relieving the pressure a bit and moving a lot more than it was. It’s obviously affecting all the other airports.’

Kylee Charles, who was among those stuck in queues at Gatwick, told MailOnline: ‘We were caught up in the chaos. We’ve only just got out of Gatwick after waiting in huge queues of disgruntled travellers. 

‘The Gatwick team took a while to get their back-up plan up and running, which consisted of a series laptops and what appeared to be additional staff; who were all calm and collected.’

Another passenger, Jenny, had been flying from Copenhagen to Edinburgh Airport with RyanAir when the e-gates suddenly closed.

‘We were corralled in passport control and the e-gate passport machines were rejecting everyone telling them to seek assistance,’ Jenny told MailOnline.

‘The machines were then turned off and the person who was managing the queue was apologetic, saying they were understaffed and he didn’t know what was going on. It appeared to be a problem to manually process people.

‘Finally, and this was quite a while later, they decided to manually process people, but all in all it was a shambolic welcome to Scotland. Really embarrassing and a very poor impression of Edinburgh Airport.’

Felix Ostman, 30, who has just arrived at Heathrow Airport on a flight from Oslo around 9pm last night, told MailOnline: ‘I’ve just got here and it’s totally chaos, with waiting times over an hour. 

‘The e-gates are now working and UK/EU/US/Australia citizens are asked to use them, however the line is massive. Other nationalities are handled manually by the Border Force.’

After more than an hour, Felix said he only moved about 30 metres – despite announcements that the e-gates were up and running again.

‘There are just so many people here,’ he told MailOnline. ‘I’m quite young – I think it is quite a bit worse for others, like people with young children in the queue that will have to be here for hours. I just want to get home, too.’

Due to the massive queues ahead of him, Felix expected to be stuck at Heathrow ‘a few more hours’.

Another passenger, Ella Blake, who arrived at Liverpool Airport last night, said: ‘The systems went down as our flight’s passengers were going through security.’

She added that ‘staff were as quick as they could’ as they moved arrivals through. 

Gemma O’Kelly, 40, had been travelling from Faro in Portugal to Stansted with her five children when she got caught up in the delays.

The event planner told MailOnline last night: ‘The airport suddenly said systems were down and that they would check people through manually, however, they had no power at all.

‘We waited 90 minutes but the queues will have people waiting for hours. They said it was a counter-terrorism procedure and that all systems in the UK had gone down, every port and airport in the UK had lost power to their systems. … They didn’t mention an incident just that their computers had lost power.’

The mother-of-five, who was travelling with her partner and children who are between the ages of one and 15, said there were a ‘load of babies crying’ as more and more people joined the queues for the manual gates.

‘It was just frustrating as we were told 10 minutes then nothing for 30 minutes,’ Ms O’Kelly said. 

‘They kept saying they would be manually checking people through but nothing was happening for around 1 hour and 20. The others will be there much longer.’

MailOnline reporter Rebecca Lawrence was among those stuck in the Gatwick queues. 

She said around 11pm last night: ‘I’ve only been in the queue for about ten minutes thus far and honestly, it doesn’t look as bad as Heathrow, so I’m feeling lucky about that! But it is roasting and everyone is irritated.’

‘We have been given no updates or explanation from any staff. They are just shouting at us to move to the right so the mobility cars can get through,’ she added.

When announcements finally came via the tannoy, the airport thanked passengers for their patience.  

Ms Lawrence said about the experience: ‘Families tried to get to the front but staff said there were no special queues for children. People started shouting to let out people with tiny babies at the back.’ 

She added that people were ‘stuck in a bottle neck queuing in the tunnels in the heat’, but once passengers reached the main concourse ‘everyone sped through quite quickly.’

Sam Morter, 32, who landed at Heathrow’s Terminal 3 at around 7.30pm from Sri Lanka, said he saw airport staff ‘scrambling’ to sort the situation after the technical issue caused significant disruption at airports across the country.

He said: ‘We headed to passport control where it already started to become pandemonium in there. All of the e-gates had just gone down and all of them had blank screens.

‘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.’

‘A lot of disgruntled, angry and frustrated passengers and people coming off of long-haul flights very tired, so that didn’t help. Not great scenes,’ he added.

Ryanair had warned passengers due to arrive at UK airports about the delays in their app last night.

The notification read: ‘Please be advised that the Electronic Passport gates are temporarily unavailable at all UK Airports. You may experience extended queue times at passport control in airports in the United Kingdom as a result of this outage.’

A Heathrow Airport spokesperson said in a statement last night: ‘Border Force is currently experiencing a nationwide issue which is impacting passengers being processed through the Border. 

‘Our teams are supporting Border Force with their contingency plans to help resolve the problem as quickly as possible and are on hand to provide passenger welfare. We apologise for any impact this is having to passenger journeys.’

Manchester Airport’s statement read: ‘We are aware of an issue with UK Border Force’s systems across the country, affecting a significant number of airports. 

‘Our Resilience Team and customer services colleagues are supporting passengers while UK Border Force and the Home Office fix the issue.’

Edinburgh Airport said in a statement: ‘Border Force is experiencing a nationwide technical outage affecting UK airports. 

‘Although not in a peak arrivals period, some passengers may experience longer than normal waits at the border while UKBF works to fix the issue. Thank you for your patience.’ 

Stansted Airport said in their statement: ‘We are aware of an issue with UK Border Force’s systems across the country, affecting all UK airports. 

‘Our operational and customer service colleagues are supporting passengers while UK Border Force and the Home Office fix the issue.’

A Home Office spokesperson told MailOnline last night: ‘We are aware of a technical issue affecting e-gates across the country.

‘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.’

The Border Crossing system suffered repeated crashes leading to massive queues at Heathrow when it was introduced in summer 2021.

More recently there were queues of more than an hour at Stansted arrivals halls on April 25 after the e-gates all failed.

Border Crossing was rushed into use – when it was already three years late – because new requirements to check EU travellers in the same way as other international passengers could not be carried out by the database it replaced, the Warnings Index.

The Warnings Index is still available as a back-up but is due to be switched off permanently soon, it is understood.

The Commons’ Public Accounts Committee looked at Border Crossing in March 2021 and warned the Home Office had ‘no proof that systems can cope with passenger volumes that existed prior to Covid’.

The MPs also criticised the ‘staggering’ cost of Government IT schemes and blamed a ‘lack of effective leadership, management and oversight’.