Bank-holiday-style queues snaked through Heathrow and Gatwick this morning after a nationwide outage hit the UK’s automated passport e-gates. The failure began just after 05:30 BST and lasted more than six hours, forcing Border Force officers to switch to manual processing for all arrivals—including British citizens. Passengers reported two-hour waits, missed onward connections and abandoned airport transfers. The Home Office blamed a "technical fault in the central biometric matching system" and said engineers from Fujitsu had restored service by early afternoon. However, union officials said the incident once again highlighted staffing shortages: "When the machines go down there simply aren’t enough officers on the desks to cope," warned the PCS union. Airlines including British Airways and Virgin Atlantic offered to rebook passengers free of charge if they missed domestic rail or coach connections. Business-travel managers should advise travellers to retain boarding passes and receipts to support EU Regulation 261 compensation claims where applicable. Frequent-flier programmes expect a spike in customer complaints about tier-point expiry because delays prevented connecting flights. Mobility teams should document any compliance breaches—such as late payroll tax registrations—caused by the disruption and annotate files accordingly in case of HMRC audit.
Source: Saudi Press
