described by one passenger today as an utterjoke. these scenes were repeated at airports across the uk. severe delays in manchester where, again, passengers struggled to get through passport control. and at heathrow, arriving passengers were forced to wait more than three hours. a couple of individuals had tojump queues a couple of individuals had tojump queues and police got engaged. and we also queues and police got engaged. and we also had a passenger that fainted~ we also had a passenger that fainted. it we also had a passenger that fainted. , ., . ., .. fainted. it is now quarter to two and we have fainted. it is now quarter to two and we have been fainted. it is now quarter to two and we have been told - fainted. it is now quarter to two and we have been told all- fainted. it is now quarter to two and we have been told all the l and we have been told all the computers and we have been told all the computers are and we have been told all the computers are down - and
it was too sensitive to tell you any more. but obviously it was not just individual gates, it was an issue with the system. is there anything with your experience that you can say it could have been? could it have been hacked, perhaps? or what could it have been? so, there obviously is an interface between the e gates that are installed at the airports and home office systems, because everybody who comes into the country, whether via an e gate or via an officer, has to be thoroughly checked against systems. i can only assume that there was some connectivity issue between the e gates and the home office systems. i obviously can t go into details about what those systems might be. but clearly, security at the border is paramount and we cannot let anybody through the border unless they have been properly checked, even though we know 99.99% of traffic is perfectly genuine, we can t afford to take that risk.
the alternative fallback strategy is to push everybody through the manual controls, where officers have the systems to do the manual checks there. but we do rely very much on these e gates, partuclarly at busy holiday periods like this. i heard something like 60 80% of passengers are processed through the e gates. are the airports too reliant on them? there will probably be be an inquiry after theirs. there will probably be be an inquiry after theirs. at airports around the world, we are talking about automated border controls, whether they are e gates, kiosks, orsomething, because the volume of traffic no longer enables us to see every single passenger and check their passports personally by an officer. but i think there are some questions about the back up plan, which at the moment was just switch to manual, and if you don t have enough officers available, then you will get three to four hour long queues. also, i think the communication
the home office say there was a failure of the whole uk border system. in particular, e gates, where passengers scan their own passports, stopped working. well, this is one of the worst outages already facing the passport e gates system. in the past, when we ve seen the odd outage, it s generally been for two or three hours, it s been fixed fairly quickly. the timing of all this disruption couldn t have been worse the start of a busy bank holiday weekend. the home office have been trying to fix this problem, they say, as a matter of urgency to minimise disruption. but when i asked them, exactly what is the problem that they re trying to fix? they said it was too sensitive to say. e gates also stopped working at the eurostar terminal in paris, causing more disruption. tonight, the home office says all the issues have been resolved and e gates are again working normally, but it s been a miserable day for tens of thousands of passengers, stuck in endless queues. graham satchell, bbc