This is what happens when agentless airport gates go wrong

The British e-Gates system experienced a systemwide outage on May 7.

May 8, 2024 - 22:30

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This is what happens when agentless airport gates go wrong

The week started off with chaos at airports across the United Kingdom when, on May 7, the eGates that the country uses for its own citizens and some EU members experienced a system-wide outage.

Many travelers attempting to clear customs at major British airports such as London’s Heathrow and Gatwick as well as in Manchester, Birmingham and Edinburgh reported massive crowds and waiting for hours without information on when they would be able to pass. Customs officers ended up having to clear travelers manually and, as one of them described to the BBC, he ended up spending longer at customs than on his flight to London from Portugal.

British authorities have been rolling out and expanding the eGate system to great fanfare as a way to “enable quicker travel into the UK.” There are currently 270 eGates at airports and certain sea and rail crossings into the UK and, while currently available only to citizens and EU members, British customs authorities said that they were working to expand it to the point that most nationalities could clear customs without talking to an agent simply by presenting their passport details and being confirmed by facial recognition technology.

British customs spent a lot of time bragging around going fully digital

"We will know a lot more information about people upfront," UK Border Force Director-General Phil Douglas said at the time. "We will know if they've been in the UK before. We'll know what their compliance with immigration laws is.”

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But at least for now, the system is still prone to serious glitches. The British Home Office has ruled out that the outage was caused by a hack or some other type of “malicious cyber activity” but still does not know what did go wrong. It said further that “eGates at UK airports came back online shortly after midnight” on May 8.

“Our teams are supporting Border Force with their contingency plans to help resolve the problem as quickly as possible and are on hand to provide passenger welfare,” a Heathrow Airport representative said during the worst of the bottleneck. “We apologise for any impact this is having to passenger journeys.”

There are reasons facial recognition tech use in airports has its critics

While largely resolved within 24 hours, the breakdown ignited a wider discussion of the problems caused by digitalization not just when things break down but in terms of traveler privacy. Critics often point out that, even if used solely for identification, sensitive passport data could be accessed by bad actors and thereby create a lifetime of problems around identity fraud.

“We can't change our biometrics without extreme measures like burning off our fingerprints or getting extreme facial reconstruction surgery," Adam Schwartz, the primary privacy litigation director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, recently told the Washington Post. "Unlike other numbers that can be changed if we're a victim of a fraud or whatnot, we have our biometrics for life.”

That said, most countries have generally been moving toward greater use of facial recognition technology in airports — the US has also been testing agentless check-in for certain domestic travelers with clearance.

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