(Bloomberg) -- A glitch in the UK’s electronic gate system that caused long lines and chaotic scenes at some of the nation’s busiest airports on Tuesday evening has been fixed, the Home Office said. 

Airports including London Heathrow, the country’s busiest, experienced a system outage that the hub described as a “nationwide issue.” Immigration officers were forced to manually process incoming passengers. London Gatwick and airports in Manchester and Edinburgh and Glasgow, Scotland, were also affected. 

The system came back online shortly after midnight, the Home Office said in a statement. 

“As soon as engineers detected a wider system network issue at 7:44 p.m., a large scale contingency response was activated within six minutes,” it said. “At no point was border security compromised and there is no indication of malicious cyber activity.”

Stranded passengers took to social media to voice their frustration, saying they’d been stuck in long lines at airports and were worried about catching the last trains back home late in the evening. 

“We apologize to travelers caught up in the disruption and thank our partners, including airlines, for their co-operation and support,” the Home Office said. 

Border Force is part of the UK Home Office and is responsible for securing the UK border by carrying out immigration and customs controls. 

©2024 Bloomberg L.P.