Manchester Airport passengers faced long delays after 'national outage' at e-gates

Manchester Airport passengers faced long delays at border control after a 'national outage' at Border Force e-gates.

Images shared on social media show long lines of holidaymakers trying to return to the UK on Tuesday 7 May.

Other airports were also hit by long queues. The problem affected the e-gates system at airports including Manchester and passports had to be checked manually.

The issue was resolved early on Wednesday morning.

A Home Office spokesperson said in a statement: “eGates at UK airports 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.”

On Tuesday evening, a Manchester Airport spokesman said: "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."

Airlines are also informed customers of the disruption - and one claimed the problem was affecting "all UK airports".

A notification on the Ryanair app 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."

Late last month, travellers were stuck in huge queues for at least 45 minutes after a Border Force outage hit UK airports including Edinburgh. The Home Office later confirmed problems with e-Gates. Lengthy lines emerged at Gatwick Airport, with issues also reported at Heathrow and Luton.

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