The wholesale failure of e-gates at the UK border at the start of the Whitsun bank holiday was due to an outage triggered by a badly timed system upgrade.
Border Force and the Home Office have not publicly acknowledged the cause of the failure of all 270 e-gates on the evening of Friday, May 26, which led to four-hour delays at arrivals on the Saturday as passengers queued for manual passport checks.
However, the Home Office was warned of the risks of upgrades by the e-gates IT provider two years ago.
Aviation and maritime minister Baroness Vere let slip the cause at Abta’s Travel Matters conference in London last week, admitting: “The e-gates issue was caused by an upgrade.” She said: “We’ve made the point [to Border Force], ‘Don’t do an upgrade on the Friday evening of the May half-term’.”
The Home Office blamed a “border system fault” at the time, but gave no details, and a source at the PCS union, which represents Border Force staff, claimed the e-gates had been “failing for some time”.
That theory was downplayed by aviation sources who insisted: “The e-gates are not falling over all the time. The system is pretty solid.”
Multinational technology company Vision-Box has the contract to install and operate the e-gates and an aviation source confirmed: “The IT provider scheduled the update. It’s unbelievable they would do that. The day before a big getaway is not the time to be tinkering. It’s crazy.
“We’ve been assured they’ll schedule future updates at a less sensitive time. But the damage has been done.”
The source added: “The response of ministers doesn’t fill us with confidence. The silver lining is that it was easily fixed, not systemic. We’ve not heard of any systems issue with the e-gates.”
However, a report on the ePassport gates submitted to the home secretary in June 2021 by the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration, David Neal, noted concerns among Border Force that Vision-Box “did not have the resources to properly implement upgrades”.
A second aviation source said: “They have to perform regular updates for security reasons. [But] it wasn’t smart to do it on the Friday of a bank holiday. Most big outages are caused by system updates.”
More: Air traffic control strikes ‘more of a concern than e-gates failure’