“Human logjam”: E-gate outage causes chaos across major UK airports

“Human logjam”: E-gate outage causes chaos across major UK airports

Thousands of travellers across the UK were delayed on Friday after a tech problem hit self-service passport gates.

Major airports including Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and Edinburgh were caught up in an e-gate outage last week causing a “human logjam”.

The outage, which affected gates that allow travellers with biometric passports to pass through without manual inspection, came at an already fraught time for UK airports, after weeks of Border Force staff issues resulted in widespread passenger anger, according to BBC News.

Famous documentary filmmaker and journalist Louis Theroux was among those caught up in the delays.

The British Home Office said the problem was quickly identified and resolved; however, it has been reported that arriving passengers were prevented from deplaning as a result.

“This afternoon, a technical issue affected e-gates at a number of ports, ” a spokesperson for the Home Office told BBC News.

“The issue was quickly identified and has now been resolved.

“We have been working hard to minimise disruption and apologise to all passengers for the inconvenience caused.”

At Heathrow in particular, passengers have recently faced long queues while staff struggled with COVID-19 documentations on top of passport and visa checks.


Featured image source: Twitter/@louistheroux

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