Passengers at London Stansted Airport faced hours of disruption on Sunday after a power surge knocked out a string of key airport systems, leaving long queues at security, baggage handling and passport control.
The surge affected the airport and the surrounding local area, temporarily taking offline the systems that keep a modern terminal moving: security screening lanes, baggage handling and parts of immigration processing. With electronic checks degraded, staff fell back on slower manual processes while engineers worked to bring the systems back online.
A spokesperson for Stansted Airport said: “Due to an earlier power surge that has affected the airport and local area, a number of airport systems were temporarily impacted.”
In a later update, the airport said: “While most systems are now back in operation, some remain affected and not operating to full capacity, including security and baggage systems. Teams are working hard to restore all services and support passengers on their journeys through the airport.” The airport also apologised “for any disruption and inconvenience they may have experienced while services were being restored.”
Travellers described the knock-on effects in stark terms. One passenger posting online said it was taking two hours to get through security, while another described the departures hall as “rammed”. Those accounts are passengers’ own reports, not airport figures, but they match the picture of crowded halls and slow-moving lines that emerged through the day.
Arriving passengers had their own ordeal. Traveller Jill Stakem said the airport’s internal tram system had failed earlier, and that people were “being held in a corridor for over 90 minutes” as they waited to reach immigration control. She described the wait as horrendous, citing a lack of communication, seating and water during the long delay.
The airport’s internal shuttle service also remained out of service because of a technical fault. Contingency bussing was put into operation to carry passengers between the terminal and the gates, adding another step to journeys that were already running late.
By Sunday evening, most systems were back in operation, but the disruption did not end there. Airlines were left working through queues of waiting passengers and rebalancing aircraft and crew, so residual delays continued into the night even as the terminal itself began to clear.
The timing made a bad day worse. Stansted, London’s third-busiest airport, handles around 85,000 passengers a day and nearly 30 million a year, and Sunday fell in the school half-term getaway period, when the single-terminal airport is at its busiest. A fault that slows security and baggage handling by even a fraction quickly turns into queues that stretch through the departures hall.
That is because an airport terminal is a chain: every passenger must pass through check-in, security and, on arrival, border control, and every bag must be screened, sorted and loaded. When one link in that chain slows down, the queue behind it grows fast, and it takes far longer to clear than it did to form. Manual bag searches and hand checks can keep people moving, but only at a fraction of the usual speed.
For anyone travelling through Stansted in the coming days, the practical advice is unchanged: check your flight’s status with your airline before leaving for the airport, allow extra time at the terminal, and keep essentials — medication, chargers, snacks and water — in hand luggage rather than a checked bag.
It is the second time in days the airport’s rail link has been disrupted: on Thursday, Stansted Express services were suspended after a fallen tree blocked the line. Separately, Stansted Express services were cancelled on Saturday after damage to overhead power lines. Neither of those rail problems caused Sunday’s power surge, which was a separate incident at the airport itself.
