Travelers entering the UK faced long lines as electronic gates for passport control stopped operating, adding to frustrations on a bank holiday weekend that started after two days of cancellations at British Airways Plc.
(Bloomberg) — Travelers entering the UK faced long lines as electronic gates for passport control stopped operating, adding to frustrations on a bank holiday weekend that started after two days of cancellations at British Airways Plc.
The Home Office, the department responsible for controlling immigration, said Saturday a technical problem affected the border system at airports nationwide. Photos posted on Twitter showed long lines at London’s Heathrow Airport and elsewhere as passengers waited to be processed manually.
“We are working to resolve the issue as soon as possible,” the Home Office said in a statement.
By late afternoon, the e-gates were starting to come back on, the BBC reported, with the busiest spots getting priority attention.
Elsewhere, cars and coaches headed to Dover queued up as the port cleared a backlog caused by an earlier technology issue. The problem has been resolved and the wait time is down to under 30 minutes, the port said on Twitter.
British Airways said Saturday it’s fixed an IT issue and resumed its normal schedule. “We are operating as usual,” the airline said in an email.
The carrier scrapped about 200 flights on Thursday and Friday, according to FlightAware, the flight-tracking site. The cancellations affected more than 20,000 travelers, the Press Association reported.
Airlines and airports have said they’re better prepared to handle a massive surge in bookings than they were a year ago, when a post-pandemic rebound overwhelmed the industry and led to thousands of canceled flights, misplaced luggage and long lines at airports from Heathrow to Amsterdam to Frankfurt.
(Updates with gates starting to return in fourth paragraph.)
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