Passengers arriving into the UK faced lengthy delays owing to a "nationwide issue" affecting the more than 270 eGates at the UK’s major air and rail ports.

Issues were reported at Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Birmingham, Bristol, Edinburgh, Manchester and Newcastle airports, forcing Border Force officials to manually process all arrivals.

A Home Office spokesperson told the BBC the outage was caused by "system network issue", which was first reported at around 7.50pm.

The Home Office later confirmed the eGates came back online "shortly after midnight", stressing there was no indication of "malicious cyberactivity" or that border security had been compromised.

However, issues at other ports where there are no eGates – such as Belfast International airport – point to a wider failure of Border Force systems.

"Border Force is experiencing a network wide IT issue," the airport tweeted shortly after 10pm on Tuesday. "We are working with them to deploy contingency plans to process internationally arriving flights while the situation is resolved. We apologise to passengers who may experience longer processing times."

First-hand accounts passed to several national media outlets align with images and footage posted to social media, showing huge queues at passport control at a number of UK airports.