Airline passengers have been assured a nationwide outage that caused chaos at UK airports will not happen again. Huge queues formed following a hitch with a system meant to speed things up.

The Home Office has issued a statement after passport controls were affected by an issue with automated electronic gates (eGates). The UK-wide issue was first reported by Edinburgh Airport. Among other airports affected on Thursday, April 25, were Manchester, Birmingham, Heathrow, London Gatwick, London Luton and Stansted.

At Britain’s 15 airports and Eurostar terminals there are more than 270 eGates. These use facial recognition technology to check the identity of passengers against their passport photo.

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They are meant to speed up passport control processes, the MEN reports. Passengers look into camera and scan their passport to be granted entry into the country. In some airports the system has completely replaced physical Border Force officers. Others still offer both methods. The Home Office said security at the border was not affected by the outage.

One passenger arriving at Manchester Airport said he waited one hour and 20 minutes to get through passport control at Terminal 3.

Tom Amos was flying back from Alicante when he saw a queue filling up three corridors. North Wales Live has a WhatsApp community group where you can get the latest stories delivered straight to your phone

In a statement, a Home Office spokesperson said: “On Thursday, April 26, a technical issue affected eGates across the country. The issue was quickly identified and has now been resolved.

“We have comprehensively reviewed the causes and will ensure this issue does not occur again.” Manchester Airport confirmed the issue had been resolved by 7pm on Thursday.

Rita Stuart was flying to Turkey when she was turned away and told to return later. She had tried to get through security less than three hours before her flight was due to take off.

She said other passengers were also struggling to scan their passports, adding: “People were quite irate.” Sign up for the North Wales Live newsletter sent twice daily to your inbox