Passengers arriving into the UK faced lengthy delays owing to a "nationwide issue" affecting the more than 270 eGates at the UK’s major air and rail ports.
Issues were reported at Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Birmingham, Bristol, Edinburgh, Manchester and Newcastle airports, forcing Border Force officials to manually process all arrivals.
A Home Office spokesperson told the BBC the outage was caused by "system network issue", which was first reported at around 7.50pm.
The Home Office later confirmed the eGates came back online "shortly after midnight", stressing there was no indication of "malicious cyberactivity" or that border security had been compromised.
