The nationwide airport outage has finally been resolved after hours of long queues at multiple UK airports.
It caused huge delays at passport e-gates at Heathrow, Gatwick, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Bristol, Newcastle and Manchester late on Tuesday.
It caused major delays for arriving passengers.
The BBC reports one passenger waited at passport control konger than the duration of his flight from Lisbon.
The e-gates are automated barriers that use facial recognition to check identity.
There are nearly 300 e-gates located at UK airports and international rail stations.
The hours-long outage forced staff to manually process arriving passengers.
“E-gates at UK airports came back online shortly after midnight,” the Home Office said.
A spokesperson said the problem was a ‘system network issue.’
“At no point was border security compromised, and there is no indication of malicious cyber activity”.
Belfast International Airport, which does not have e-gates, said its Border Force systems were also affected.
Most scheduled flights are now departing and arriving on time as of Wednesday morning.
