There were no happy landings at UK airports after an IT network meltdown left passport e-gates firmly closed - and many thousands of exhausted travellers stranded. Families with small children were among those crammed into corridors or marooned on planes still not cleared to taxi off the runway.
Some complained of waiting for hours without food or water - or even bed down on terminal floors as onwards transport options were overcrowded or services had finished for the night.
The tech failure bricked e-gates to blank screens as Border Force officials processed passengers the old-fashioned way of manual processing.
But it’s not the first time - as a look back through the Evening Standard’s archive reveals.
Last May, we had: ‘Utter chaos: Passport e-gate failure causes massive delays at airports.’ Before that, in September 2021, it was: ‘Thousands stuck in huge queues at Heathrow as e-gates fail.’
The Home Office, which is responsible for Border Force, blamed a vague “wider system network issue” for the chaos, which began on Tuesday evening and continued into the early hours of Wednesday.
In a statement, the Home Office said a “large scale contingency response was activated within six minutes” of the outage, and there was “no indication of malicious cyber activity”.
But it followed another major incident that compromised government systems, as a major cyberattack targeted the Ministry of Defence and payroll records of 270,000 British military personnel.
While there is no suggested link between the MoD wages hack and this latest Border Force passport gates meltdown, both episodes shine a light on the fragility of our reliance on digital infrastructure.
For the latest on the travel implications for your summer holiday, The Standard podcast is joined on the line by Sean Tipton, spokesperson for travel association Abta.
Listen above, or wherever you find your podcasts.
