A software failure in the United Kingdom’s central biometric matching system knocked out the country’s entire network of biometric ePassport gates for more than six hours yesterday, forcing Border Force officers to revert to manual passport processing for all arriving passengers at Heathrow, Gatwick, and airports across the country.
The outage began just after 05:30 BST. Engineers from Fujitsu restored service by early afternoon. The Home Office attributed the failure to a technical fault in the central biometric matching system and ruled out a cyberattack as the cause. Because the fault was centralized, every gate on the national network failed simultaneously rather than individual units failing in isolation, a characteristic that left no automated fallback available at any affected airport.
Passengers reported waiting times of up to two hours, missed connecting flights, and abandoned airport transfers during the outage. UK e-gates use facial biometric matching against ePassport chip data to verify travelers, and the failure affected both UK citizens using the gates for rapid processing and international arrivals who were diverted into extended manual queues.
The April 2026 failure is the latest in a pattern of recurring nationwide e-gate failures at UK airports, following comparable simultaneous shutdowns in 2021 and May 2024 that also forced Border Force to resort to manual passport processing. The May 2024 outage lasted approximately five hours; Tuesday’s disruption extended beyond six. The outage disrupted infrastructure that the UK expanded facial recognition to several airports in March 2025, a significant investment in automated border control that the failure returned entirely to manual operation.
The disruption came the day before the EU’s Entry/Exit System reached full mandatory operation across all 29 European countries on April 10. The Home Office has not indicated that its relationship with Fujitsu is under review following the outage.
Sources: VisaHQ News, UK Parliament Hansard
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
