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Ask HN: Cause of UK e-gates outage?
A Bank-holiday weekend in the UK, the passport-control system (e-gates) goes down and all passports have to be checked manually, so huge queues etc. I'd assumed an unwise Friday deploy, but the press says the issue is "too sensitive to discuss", eg: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-65731795
Anyone with inside information they'd like to share?
- etothepii 3y agoProbably the Lazarus group.
- jonplackett 3y agoWe’ll find out next season!
- yellow_lead 3y agoToo sensitive to discuss can also mean too embarrassing to discuss
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 3y agoThey watched "Yes, Minister" and took it as a guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Y4PEqvk0Jg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Y4PEqvk0Jg
- switch007 3y agoThere was an issue with France’s system too at Dover. It wouldn’t be tin foil hat territory to suggest a coordinated cyber attack. I wonder who has snuck through the chaos. UK border control regularly fails when the systems up, god knows what about when they’re down
- bawolff 3y agoOr they both used the same vendor and had the same issue.
- Nextgrid 3y agoCould just be that both systems need to communicate to each other (when it comes to adjacent-country border control it's not a bad idea to share data about potential threats or intruders) and one system didn't properly handle failures to communicate with the other system.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- jimbobthemighty 3y agoMaybe they bought an upgrade from someone who donated to the CONservatives?
- _joel 3y agoI've seen them running their stuff on Heroku, maybe nobody told them the free tier was going
- c7DJTLrn 3y agoSome pod in CrashLoopBackOff somewhere. Nah, just kidding, but the fact that it's country-wide indicates it's probably a server issue.
- the-golden-one 3y agoNo idea but I’m gonna go for expired TLS cert, and Finance won’t let you have the corporate card to renew it until Monday when the approver is back from holiday.
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago> Until Monday when the approver is back from holiday. Until Tuesday. Monday 29th May is a public holiday in the UK.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- btc-ln-ftw 3y agoRe: e-gates shambles Fujitsu's contract runs from 4 September 2021 to 2024 https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/09/fujitsu_border_crossing_contract/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/09/fujitsu_border_crossi... https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/14/uk_border_upgrade_confusion/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/14/uk_border_upgrade_con... Re: Horizon disgrace Fujitsu has also, so far, escaped financial penalties, whereas the government has been forced to set aside £1bn to cover the costs of compensating victims of the scandal. Meanwhile, Fujitsu is continuing to win significant IT projects with the UK government. https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252526102/Fujitsu-to-finally-face-up-to-blame-for-its-part-in-Post-Office-Horizon-scandal https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252526102/Fujitsu-to-fin... UK Gov & Fujitsu smells bad
- nicktelford 3y agoThey honestly should be blacklisted after the Horizon scandal. Allowing them to get away with it sets a precedent that could encourage other companies to behave just as irresponsibly. As it stands, is yet another example of privatising profits while socialising the costs, just in this case, the costs weren't (entirely) financial.
- pydry 3y agoA lot of UK government IT is like this and has been forever. There was a short period under the coalition where GDS was set up and they created a consistent framework for people to work with and would open a portion of the market up to smaller players. Now it's mostly large bodyshop middlemen like the prime minister's wife's company taking a 70% cut for the work of a cheap offshore developer.
- blibble 3y agoa lot of the problem is the contract procurement rules, which are written so only large companies are capable of bidding a legacy of EU membership, but I doubt the government has any will to change it
- Nextgrid 3y agoUnderpaid third-world slave working for whatever shitty consultancy got the contract pushed the wrong button. It's "too sensitive to discuss" because it would be inconvenient to admit that the people who have privileged access to this system aren't paid enough to give a shit and are very vulnerable to bribery.
- higo 3y ago[flagged]
- blowski 3y agoA good Indian or Nigerian engineer is just as good as a Californian or British one. But there are outsourcing companies who put junior developers on difficult projects with almost no support and then overwork them. It’s not racism or colonialism to say such people won’t produce high quality systems. It’s the rich exploiting the poor, rather than one country exploiting another. I have no idea whether any of this is relevant to the e-gates issue.
- higo 3y ago[flagged]
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago> whatever consultancy pushed the wrong button. So, the usual then? https://www.theregister.com/2017/06/02/british_airways_data_centre_configuration/ https://www.theregister.com/2017/06/02/british_airways_data_...
- raverbashing 3y agoI'm not sure why this should affect holidaymakers, if I remember correctly passports are checked on the way in, but not when going out of the UK correct?
- heyest 3y agoHolidaymakers need to return home eventually.
- midasuni 3y agoHolidaymakers tend to return from holiday as much as they go. Outbound flights can be delayed too if people can’t disembark from planes because the terminal is over capacity in the arrivals side.
- raverbashing 3y agoYes but the bank holiday is the Monday, they would be returning on Monday, maybe Tuesday but not today
- midasuni 3y agoMany holiday changeover days at Saturday
- danpalmer 3y agoNo insight here, but I've always wondered if the e-gates are doing anything "clever" with the camera, or if they're just connecting you to some call-centre in Swindon where your face and passport details pop up in front of someone with a lot less training than traditional border security. It might be doing facial recognition, but it feels too reliable for the level of facial recognition I expect a consultancy could pull off in a government contract.
- Tallianar 3y agoI don't have a full answer but what I observed is that there is always someone that is nearby and "in control". The base I think works like this: - you scan the passport - you look at the camera - your passport details & photo are sent to the control room with your live feed - a guy looks at everything those details plus your immigration history and other info - same guy decides to let you in or send you to a desk This was particularly obvious in the old Gibraltar border where you could easily be the only person going through and so the agent had to do the routine just to let you pass.
- danpalmer 3y agoYeah this is pretty much my assumption. I would imagine that the person doing the judging may not be on site as it's probably cheaper and easier to have a bigger workforce in one office, flex the people in shifts, load balance across all ports with the gates, etc. I do wonder how much is automated. For example, is the gate fully automated in calculating a risk score and then referring you to a border agent if above a threshold? Is a person looking at the details in realtime to decide that, or are they just doing facial recognition, or are they only involved when the gates fail.
- cmsj 3y agoThose stupid gates have never worked for me, and I've always suspected that they are actually just connected to a call-centre type operation. Given how fast my phone can recognise my face (in 3d no less), the e-gates are a total joke.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- noodlesUK 3y agoI’m not sure if all the gates are by the same vendor, but at least one of them is vision-box[1]. My suspicion is there’s a backend system on the Home Office’s side that went down. The ICIBI did an assessment of the epassport gate system recently, detailed here [2]. [2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1045688/An_inspection_of_ePassport_gates_June_2020_to_January_2021.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... [1] https://www.vision-box.com/ https://www.vision-box.com/
- jonathantf2 3y agoThese things have never worked for me, the camera goes up and down like mad for a minute then I have to go and see a person. What a waste of time
- ta1243 3y agoThe ones at Paris last year on Eurostar were so slow they were takeing at least 45, but with retries average of about 60 seconds to process someone. I think there were 5. There was only 1 train an hour leaving, but the trains had 900 seats. You can see the problem. With airports, I used to come in to Heathrow 50 times a year. There was a great system called Iris, you literally walked up and walked through, barely needed to stop. It never failed on me. They got rid of it, partly because it wouldn't scale (as it was literally just your Iris pattern, not a pattern + passport), so they only offered it to frequent users.
- jonathantf2 3y agoLast time I used them was at Gare du Nord, most of the people on our train had to go see the one guy to manually review the passport.
- ta1243 3y agoOne thing that would massively cut passport queues and save money would be for the UK to join Schengen.
- hankchinaski 3y ago“Too sensitive to discuss” very likely mean cyber attack
- ak_111 3y agoWhy would it be though? What is sensitive about signalling in high-level terms cyber attack is suspected? If the worry is that you might be revealing your sources to the perpetrator, then wouldn't mentioning "too sensitive to discuss" already be as revealing to the perpetrator.
- PaulAJ 3y agoNothing specific, but I've seen some big systems from the inside, and I know the kind of thing that leads to failures: * Back in the 60s they got a big IBM computer to do some stuff. Then later on they needed to do other stuff. The old computer was too expensive and difficult to replace, so they got a new VAX or something to do the new stuff and talk to the old mainframe. Then some PCs got added to do more stuff, and so on. Today the back end consists of many different systems of different ages all talking to each other using different protocols that were designed against different requirements. Newer systems are forever being patched and updated to cope with new requirements, while the code for old requirements lurks waiting to be accidentally reactivated. Each of these systems has its own specialists for care and feeding, but nobody fully understands the whole thing. When something goes down there are not many people who can diagnose the fault and get it back up. * Government contracts have lots of rules around them to ensure value for money and prevent corruption (see the UK COVID PPE fiasco for what happens when you try to cut these rules out). But the size and complexity make even bidding for a big contract very expensive and complicated, so it tends to be the preserve of a few big companies who chose to specialise in it. Their core competence is winning these contracts, not delivering on them later. * These rules mean that everything has to be specified in detail up front, so that everybody knows what is supposed to happen. But this makes the whole thing horribly inflexible. As new requirements emerge from the woodwork there is a continuous process of renegotiation. * The UK civil service is based around the "cult of the gifted amateur". Senior managers are rotated around departments every few years. So the person who kicks off a project is rarely the person who sees it through. Everybody gets to blame someone else for failure. * When one of these big contractors fails to deliver, the Government has to chose between suing to get their money back (or some of it) in a few years, or getting the at least part of the system they actually need at a higher price. The government doesn't need the money, it needs the system. So the contractor gets to carry on regardless of failure. * Humans are very bad at managing small risks with large consequences. Many big disaster stories have at their heart someone who decided that the risk was too small to be bothered with.
- IshKebab 3y agoThey probably found a stupid bug. Like it doesn't check expiry dates on passports.
- MarcelLinda08 3y ago[dead]
- MarcelLinda08 3y ago[dead]