Edinburgh Airport: Long queues after 'nationwide issue' takes E-gates out of action

Automated E-gates which check people's passports were back up and running at Edinburgh Airport this morning after a "nationwide issue" took them out of action last night, causing long queues at airports across the UK.

The "technical outage" meant UK Border Force staff were left to process travellers manually for several hours. But the problem was resolved shortly after midnight and the system appeared to be working smoothly today.

Edinburgh Airport posted last night on social media: "Border Force is experiencing a nationwide technical outage affecting UK airports. Although not in a peak arrivals period, some passengers may experience longer than normal waits at the Border while UKBF works to fix the issue."

At about 11.30pm one person tweeted: "It’s an absolute standstill for anyone without a passport from UK, US, EU, South Korea, or a few other countries that can get through. Everyone else has been waiting about 3 hours with no end in sight."

The Home Office apologised to travellers affected by the disruption. A spokesperson said: "E-gates at UK airports came back online shortly after midnight. As soon as engineers detected a wider system network issue at 7.44pm last night, a large scale contingency response was activated within six minutes. At no point was border security compromised, and there is no indication of malicious cyber activity."

Edinburgh Airport tweeted today: "This UK airport wide issue has been resolved and UKBF eGates are operational." At 8am the airport’s website showed a “security hall time” of 21 minutes.