IT glitch takes passports gates offline across the UK

However, a cyber attack has been ruled out

A technical issue affecting UK Border Force's IT systems caused hours-long queues at airports around the country before it was fixed.

Airports across Scotland and England - including major hubs like Heathrow, Gatwick and Manchester - were affected by the outage, which first manifested on Tuesday evening.

The issue was most apparent at the border's e-gates: automated gates that scan a person's face and passport to check their identity before allowing them into the UK. There are more than 270 of them across 15 air and rail ports, which can be used by British citizens as well as those from certain other countries.

E-gates are designed to allow faster processing through Border Control. However, last night's technical issue turned them from green to red before passengers' eyes.

Normally at this point passengers would have to queue to be manually checked in by agents. However, "all manual checking procedures failed too," one passenger told the BBC. That meant locations without e-gates, like Belfast International Airport, also felt the impact.

Airports receiving multiple international arrivals were especially affected, with queues exceeding three hours at Heathrow. Others, like Glasgow, escaped the worst of the fallout.

Most airports with e-gates arrange staffing levels based on the system handling the majority of arrivals from the UK, EU, North America, Singapore, South Korea, Japan and Australasia, while Border Force officers focus on arrivals from other parts of the world.

However, that meant few staff were available to process passports when the system went down.

Home Office denies cyber attack

The Home Office, which 'owns' the UK's e-gate network, said in a statement that the system came back online "shortly after midnight."

"As soon as engineers detected a wider system network issue at 7.44pm last night, a large scale contingency response was activated within six minutes.

"At no point was border security compromised, and there is no indication of malicious cyber activity."

The Home Office apologised to passengers caught in the disruption.

Regular fliers might remember a similar issue almost exactly a year ago, when e-gates went down over the May Bank Holiday weekend.

Earlier this year a glitch in the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system grounded more than 13,000 flights across the USA.

Computing says:

International travel, especially with young children or vulnerable passengers, is a stressful enough experience as it is; the last thing you want on landing is an additional delay.

However, the UK's airports should be applauded for their fast response to the system failure. We have seen reports of queues up to three hours long, which is very unusual here, but a standard Tuesday in some other countries.

The USA, for example, has an automated border system that only applies to US residents and some visa holders. Queues at busy locations like Orlando and Las Vegas regularly exceed an hour - and that's with fully working IT.