- Passengers arriving in the UK late on Tuesday faced chaos into the early hours
- A wi-fi outage knocked out the £372million IT system used for security checks
The latest meltdown of the passport e-gates system at airports left ministers scrambling yesterday to insist the problem would not hit summer holidays.
Passengers arriving in the UK late on Tuesday faced chaos into the early hours after a wi-fi outage knocked out the £372million IT system used for security checks.
It is the fourth major malfunction of the system – supported by Fujitsu, the firm behind the Post Office’s Horizon programme – since it launched three years ago.
Home Office minister Tom Pursglove yesterday apologised to travellers, some of whom had to sleep in airports overnight.
‘The Home Secretary and I will be unswerving in our determination to ensure that every possible lesson is learned to ensure that this does not happen again,’ he told the Commons.
Gatwick Airport last night at passport control after a nationwide IT system collapse
Huge queues formed at Gatwick (pictured) and other UK airports, with people forced to wait for hours
Queues built up at Border Control at Gatwick Airport in West Sussex last night following the fault
The fault with the e-gates began late yesterday evening and wasn’t resolved until 2am
But Labour’s home affairs spokesman Dan Jarvis said the e-gates system was ‘no longer reliable enough and risks further damaging public trust in the Government’s management of our border security’.
He added: ‘The chaotic scenes across many of the UK’s airports are unacceptable – not least, given e-gates have failed on several occasions in recent years.’
Travel expert and journalist Simon Calder told MailOnline that Brits should ‘hope for the best’ this summer, but warned ‘anyone’s holiday plans can unravel’.
‘The UK is not alone on experiencing a wide range of issues that can stand between travellers and their holidays,’ he said.
‘But because our aviation infrastructure is so overstretched, especially at Heathrow and Gatwick airports, disruption can spread through the system very swiftly – with little slack in the system for recovery.
‘At this stage, though, all you can do is hope for the best over the summer, but understand anyone’s holiday plans can unravel.’
Thousands of passengers arriving on Tuesday faced huge border queues at airports including Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Manchester, Edinburgh and Belfast.
There are more than 270 e-gates at 15 airports and railway stations across the country.
The gates cross-check facial recognition scans with Border Force’s security database, named Border Crossing. The programme checks travellers’ names against terrorism records, the Police National Computer and immigration records.
It’s understood that a failure of the Government’s secure wi-fi system on Tuesday night prevented Border Crossing from updating, causing it to collapse.
As a result, the e-gates could not operate and Border Force officers had to check passports manually against back-up security databases.
System crashes led to chaos in 2021 and twice last year.