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An IT outage that caused automated passport control e-gates to crash across the UK has been resolved, with a cyber attack ruled out as the cause
An IT outage that caused the automated passport control e-gates at airports across the UK to crash on 7 May – leading to long delays for travellers entering the country – has been successfully resolved, with government officials ruling out a malicious cyber attack on the UK’s Border Force as the cause.
The outage unfolded on Tuesday evening and caused chaos at London’s Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted airports, as well as Aberdeen, Bristol, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester and Southampton, with arriving passengers reported queues of over an hour in many cases, and multiple angry travellers taking to social media platforms to voice their frustration.
Many airports were forced to deploy extra staff to assist, while working under its contingency plans, Border Force diverted all available staff to manage passenger flow through the traditional passport control desks.
A spokesperson for the Home Office, which oversees the Border Force, told Computer Weekly that the e-gate systems came back online shortly after midnight.
“As soon as engineers detected a wider system network issue at 19:44pm last night, a large scale contingency response was activated within 6 minutes,” they said.
“At no point was border security compromised and there is no indication of malicious cyber activity.
“We apologise to travellers caught up in disruption and thank our partners, including airlines for their co-operation and support,” the spokesperson added.
Besides the e-gates, some policing systems, passport systems and other immigration systems were affected by the nationwide issue affecting the Home Office’s IT organisation, DDaT (Digital, Data and Technology).
Computer Weekly understands the Home Office is currently undertaking a probe to determine the cause of the incident and take steps to pre