Technical Glitch In E-Passports Draw Huge Lines At British Airports

Anyone who tried to enter Great Britain via Europe’s most important airport in London Heathrow last night or to use an international connection had to be prepared for hours of waiting. The electronic passport controls were down.

Chaos at Europe’s largest airport

Anyone who has tried to enter London Heathrow, London Gatwick or the airports in Edinburgh, Birmingham, Bristol, Newcastle, Manchester and other places in Great Britain since around 9 p.m. German time or wanted to get a connecting flight that requires a terminal change or similar The immigration control had to be queued for hours.

It wasn’t until around 1:30 a.m. German time that the problems were apparently resolved. For the countless people waiting for passport control in British airports, this was a cause for celebration after a wait of around four hours . According to reports, the e-gate displays suddenly simply turned “green” again, causing cheers among those waiting.

As the British border police, the airport operators and British Airways all announced, there was a failure of the so-called “e-gates”. These automated electronic entry control systems are usually intended to enable quick entry or passport control. Tonight they did the complete opposite instead.

Huge queues of frustrated travelers formed at many British airports, especially London Heathrow, Europe’s largest airport with over 79 million passengers in 2023 alone. They had to prepare for the fact that their entry into Great Britain and, in some cases, their onward journey were severely delayed because the passport control, which was now carried out manually, could not be carried out quickly enough.

Countless videos are circulating on platforms such as X/Twitter and Instagram showing extremely long queues at Heathrow and elsewhere. The airline British Airways explained via the micro-blogging service that they were still struggling with the defective e-gates even at 1 a.m. The border police therefore deployed all employees for manual passport checks and asked the staff to work overtime in order to be able to check the passengers.

Nothing is known yet about the reasons for the failure of the e-gates, although the border police only spoke of “technical problems”. The fact that electronic passport controls appeared to be down across the UK points to a problem with the infrastructure used across the country to process controls.