E-gate border chaos sparked when Home Office failed to tell BT it was updating software
The airport e-gates chaos that disrupted thousands of passengers’ travel is suspected to have been caused by a Home Office blunder.
The Telegraph understands that the Home Office Wi-Fi outage, which is suspected of crashing the e-gates, was caused because it failed to tell BT about a software update.
The update overloaded the Home Office network, causing the outage that snowballed into chaos at e-gates on Tuesday at the UK’s busiest airports including Heathrow, Gatwick, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Manchester and Newcastle.
The e-gates failed at around 7.45pm on Tuesday, hitting thousands of passengers arriving back from extended May bank holiday breaks.
Border Force officers were left to manually process travellers, with images and footage shared on social media showing long queues of passengers waiting up to two hours to pass through passport control.
The failure - described by Tom Pursglove, the Home Office minister, as a “significant IT outage” - was not resolved until after midnight, stranding passengers in arrivals halls and in some cases even trapping them on planes.
The outage of the Home Office’s secure Wi-Fi system denied the e-gates access to a database, Border Crossing, which is used to check travellers’ names against terrorism records, the police national computer and immigration records. Instead, Border Force officials had to use laptops manually to do the passport checks.
Sources have now told The Telegraph that the outage was the result of the Home Office putting through a software update without informing BT.
BT contracts usually have a usage cap to avoid a Wi-Fi network being overloaded, but these can be lifted when big customers need to do major updates.
However, the Home Office did not tell BT it was carrying out the update, so it hit its limit and as a result, it shut down. BT was able to restore the systems within four hours. The impact was isolated to e-gates as it is a bespoke system, according to sources.
Mr Pursglove assured MPs that “all security checks” were maintained throughout the outage. “Border security was not compromised at any point and there is no indication of malicious cyber activity. Police access to operational systems was unaffected,” he said.
He said he “sincerely apologised” for the disruption to passengers and pledged he would be “unswerving” in his determination to ensure every lesson was learned “to ensure this does not happen again.”
He told MPs there was a “permanent fix” for the “technical issues within the Home Office network” which caused the failure.
The e-gates system has failed previously, in a similar way at the start of the May bank holiday weekend in 2023, and three times in two months in 2021.
The Home Office has been contacted for comment.
