The disruption on Thursday (25 April) also affected Eurostar passengers, as well as major airports such as Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Birmingham Edinburgh, with passengers having to wait longer for their passports to be checked manually by Border Force staff.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “We are aware of a technical issue affecting eGates across the country. We are working to resolve the issue as soon as possible and apologise to all passengers for the inconvenience caused.”
The technical problem was eventually resolved at around 8pm on Thursday.
This was not the first nationwide failure of the UK’s eGates system, which was affected by a longer outage during a bank holiday weekend in May last year.
