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E-gates ‘back online’ after chaos at Heathrow and other UK airports
🌈 Abstract
The article discusses the technical outage affecting UK Border Force e-gates at several UK airports, leading to delays and long queues for passengers on Tuesday.
🙋 Q&A
[01] Nationwide Technical Outage
1. What caused the technical outage affecting UK Border Force e-gates?
- The Home Office announced that a "system network" problem brought the e-gates down at 7:44 pm on Tuesday. There was no indication of malicious cyber activity, and border security was not compromised.
2. Which airports were affected by the technical outage?
- Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Manchester, and Bristol airports all confirmed problems with passengers being processed through the border on Tuesday evening.
3. How did the airports and authorities respond to the outage?
- Heathrow airport's Twitter/X account said all systems were running as usual shortly after midnight.
- Manchester airport said a dedicated team and customer services staff were supporting passengers while UK Border Force fixed the problem.
- The Home Office announced that the e-gates came back online shortly after midnight.
4. How did the technical outage impact passengers?
- Passengers experienced long queues and delays at passport control due to the e-gate issues.
- Some passengers reported being held at arrivals for over an hour, with the queues only getting bigger.
- One passenger said their taxi had canceled, and they were worried they would be too late for a train.
- Another passenger said their daughter had been waiting in a queue for over 2 hours after a 12-hour flight.
[02] Additional Travel Disruptions
1. What other travel disruptions were passengers facing?
- Passengers were already facing disrupted journeys to and from airports due to industrial action affecting train services across the UK throughout the week until Saturday.
- Gatwick airport advised people to plan their journey in advance and leave additional time due to limited or canceled train services to and from the airport.
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