Southampton Airport has moved to reassure passengers after a "nationwide issue" with passport e-gates caused significant disruption at airports across the country.

Scores of airports across the country were impacted by the failure on Tuesday evening, leaving thousands of passengers queuing for hours.

Among the airports affected were Gatwick, Heathrow and Bristol.

But Southampton Airport has moved to reassure passengers that the airport was not affected as the airport does not use e-passport gates.

A spokesperson for AGS, the parent company of Southampton Airport said that the airport didn’t have any international flights which were affected as the IT issue occurred later than last international flight in.

E-gates use facial recognition technology to allow travellers to enter the country without needing to be seen by a border force officer.

According to the Government’s website, there are 270 of them in total at 15 air and rail ports in the UK.

The government has said that e-gates are supposed to allow for quick and easy entry without the need for staff to man the desk.

The Home Office have now confirmed that the problem has been resolved and that the passport IT system is back online.

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Border officials were left to manually process travellers instead, with images and footage shared on social media showing long queues forming at passport control at several airports.

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.”

The spokesperson apologised to travellers caught up in disruption.