Thousands of passengers were stuck in long queues at border control across UK airports amid a "national outage" of passport e-gates

       Reports on social media reveal that Stansted, Heathrow, Luton, Gatwick, East Midlands, Edinburgh and Manchester airports are all affected by the issue.

       It has been revealed the issue is affecting border control e-gates meaning airports are having to check every passport by hand.

       The issue comes less than a fortnight after the technology last failed, leaving passengers in queues for nearly five hours until it was fixed.

       The gates reported reopened just after midnight.

       A Home Office spokesperson said in a statement early on Wednesday: “eGates at UK airports came back online shortly after midnight.

       “As soon as engineers detected a wider system network issue at 7.44pm last night, a large scale contingency response was activated within six minutes.

       “At no point was border security compromised, and there is no indication of malicious cyber activity.”

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