alt.hn

8/24/2026 at 9:45:02 AM

Woman stranded in Spain after UK's eVisa system mistakes her for twin sister

 https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/aug/24/woman-stranded-spain-uk-evisa-system-mistakes-twin-sister

by giuliomagnifico

8/24/2026 at 11:38:23 AM

This is not a software issue (not directly).

Sure, the software has a bug. Software does. Almost always. What is broken here is that it is possible to get stuck in an airport with no possibility of escalating sensibly to a chain of human beings with agency to resolve it. You could have a software process which works 99.9% of the time, and have staff at hand which could solve any solvable remaining issues like this one. They call the Home Office internal hotline, explain the issue, resolve it by manually interfering on the spot (and have a bug filed), and everyone carries on.

Instead, we demand a 100% correct system, and save money on actually having people around who can deal with the edge cases and make sure everyone has a good time. Of course, getting a project from 99.9% to 100% costs a lot of money, because that includes literally all edge cases ever (getting to 100% is as likely as reaching ∞ by multiplying any given starting number by 2 until you reach it), and so it will likely end up being more expensive in budget overruns than the 99.9% plus humans system.

Obviously, politicians must choose for the fictional 100% case, because they can't afford the cheaper 99.9% plus human one.

by Freak_NL

8/24/2026 at 2:59:02 PM

You still likely need a human bypass. "I was injured or disfigured so my face no longer anything for you to compare to. I do not now, and never shall again resemble the image in the system."

Similar things happen when you require fingerprints or retinal scans. "Well, I don't have a right hand anymore. It's in some hospital's incinerator."

And not having an override or bypass is a software issue. Designing a system that doesn't permit exceptions or overrides is bad software design.

by da_chicken

8/24/2026 at 3:25:57 PM

> [N]ot having an override or bypass is a software issue. Designing a system that doesn't permit exceptions or overrides is bad software design.

I think his point is that the designers of the software would have been aware of this, but they weren't the designers of the system, who wanted software to do All the Things.

by eszed

8/24/2026 at 5:07:30 PM

I don't follow.

You cite three meaningful changes in biometrics: disfigured, loss of fingerprint and retinal issues.

In all three cases surely the right and proper thing do to is to get your details updated on the system ? It may even be a legal requirement for you to do so in the case of official ID documents.

Of course, if you have a temporary mismatch due to being injured on holiday that's different.

But for a permanent thing I just don't see why you would not just get stuff re-issued or updated.

by traceroute66

8/24/2026 at 8:11:49 PM

If a person off on holiday just had their face burned off by one of those tabletop fire pits and is on their way home due to just getting their face burned off, something tells me the last thing on their mind is swinging by the embassy to get their biometrics updated.

The real world is messy.

by bigbuppo

8/24/2026 at 10:22:21 PM

> If a person off on holiday just had their face burned off

I suggest you actually read my post, because its clear you did not.

If you had read it, you would have seen the phrase "Of course, if you have a temporary mismatch due to being injured on holiday that's different.".

I quite clearly excluded holiday injury.

by traceroute66

8/24/2026 at 1:51:23 PM

Yeah, absolutely horrible situation to put people in, let bugs stay unfixed that leads people to being stranded in foreign countries with no clear resolution in hours, and on top of that neither parties seem to be interested in just fuzzing up and fixing the fucking problem.

> Monique Hawkins, the acting chief executive of the immigration campaign group the3million, said it had seen previous cases similar to Webb’s, adding that it highlighted vulnerabilities in the system and it was “crucial that people have a genuinely stable means by which to prove their status”.

> She told Politico the eVisa rollout had been “rushed”, adding: “We regularly see people not only denied boarding, but also compensation, as carriers and the Home Office play a blame game shifting responsibility between each other.”

by embedding-shape

8/24/2026 at 3:09:52 PM

There will always be bugs. The larger process and organization needs to be setup to deal with that.

by lokar

8/24/2026 at 3:51:57 PM

I'm hearing echoes of half the engineers and product people I've worked with in my career in tech:

"Oh, that's an edge case. 0.1% of users will encounter it. P2 bug, not a ship blocker."

by ryandrake

8/24/2026 at 4:55:14 PM

The point is, they aren't wrong. You will never get rid of all such edge cases... and even if you could, you couldn't afford to do so. The responsibility to make the larger process resilient to those types of bugs must exist somewhere, and at a higher level than engineering.

What's described here is not an engineering failure, but a process failure.

by CamperBob2

8/24/2026 at 5:32:04 PM

It's an engineering failure if the designers did not fight for it. In my career as an electronics engineer and later as a software developer it was clearly part of my job to interrogate the specification documents and almost always the customer to discover what the system really needed to do and what edge cases the customer had ignored, forgotten, or was simply unaware of.

Yes it's a process failure but just like health and safety it is everyone's responsibility.

by ninalanyon

8/24/2026 at 5:52:59 PM

Agreed, but we are lucky when we have that kind of voice, in the larger picture.

by CamperBob2

8/24/2026 at 5:29:19 PM

It's both. "Bugs are inevitable and unavoidable" is a defeatist attitude in software, albeit one that is accepted strongly and broadly.

by ryandrake

8/24/2026 at 5:54:12 PM

This is like a belief in karma. It's irrational, and it's completely untrue as far as anyone can tell, but we are all arguably better off by pretending that things really do work that way.

by CamperBob2

8/24/2026 at 12:37:58 PM

This is also a big problem at companies.

Previous company had full payments/accounts team, a few QAs, a couple accountants and SRE working on the automation of a specific payment edge case that was normally handled through support, and was taking 5-10 mins to handle per case. Whole thing took four-five months.

In the first year, less than 100 people used it, out of a few million. It was B2C, so after taxes, that amount was maybe enough to cover a couple days of lunch for the people who worked on it.

by whstl

8/24/2026 at 3:11:44 PM

This is why you need to diligently track escalations/exceptions, and add more software support as the business case to automate or streamline supports it.

by lokar

8/24/2026 at 11:58:39 AM

I mostly agree but I think the bar for the software still has to be unusually high when the failure mode is "you are not allowed to enter the country you legally live in"... The human fallback is essential, but it shouldn't become the thing that makes a fundamentally unreliable system acceptable

by MarceliusK

8/24/2026 at 12:49:03 PM

Tbh, I suspect this failure mode is far less than the old mode - which is paper based and your passport goes missing in transit at the embassy (or doesn't come back in time).

by martinald

8/24/2026 at 1:08:07 PM

Yeah the article makes it unclear but this doesn't sound like she was "stranded" for long:

> “I had no idea the issue had been corrected until I was allowed to board my flight home,” Webb said. “Had I not spent hours on the phone trying to resolve the matter, I have no idea how long I could have remained stranded abroad.”

Sounds like there were indeed channels to escalate this.

by account42

8/24/2026 at 3:08:22 PM

unfortunately this has become typical in Britain, no one can be trusted to have any responsibility or agency. its all systems with room for the real world

by mcfedr

8/24/2026 at 3:29:37 PM

>its all systems with room for the real world

The vision that it evokes is terrifying!

by structuredPizza

8/24/2026 at 3:21:45 PM

> This is not a software issue (not directly).

What's really stupid is not being allowed to get on the flight at all.

Like: she's not labelled as a "terrorist", so just let her on the flight as she's not likely to make the plane explode, and let the customs folks take her as a one-off to be dealt with on home soil. Why is it necessary to be pre-approved to even get on the flight?

by throw0101d

8/24/2026 at 3:34:00 PM

Generally if you get turned away at the destination then the airline is liable for taking you away, so they won't let you fly unless they're sure that you will be accepted at the destination country.

by KayEss

8/24/2026 at 3:48:34 PM

Under UK legislation as the owners, agents or operators of a ship or aircraft you may become liable for a charge of £2,000 for every passenger arriving in the UK without:

- a valid “immigration document” which satisfactorily establishes identity and nationality or citizenship.

- and, if the person requires a visa, a visa of the required kind or other permission to travel. This visa, or permission, may now be in either physical form, or a digital e- Visa; or

- a valid Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA), if the person requires one.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/document-checks-a...

by blitzar

8/24/2026 at 3:03:00 PM

> What is broken here is that it is possible to get stuck in an airport with no possibility of escalating sensibly to a chain of human beings with agency to resolve it

This is another instance of the usual hubris of management in thinking that automation has solved all the problems without creating any of its own, therefore all the humans are now made redundant.

by teeray

8/24/2026 at 9:55:36 PM

The backend company many financial institutions use to verify a person’s identity has details of my life mixed up with my son’s. When I do verification I have to be mindful of this, and often have to call him to make sure I don’t fail. There is no one to call. It’ll be like this forever.

by e40

8/24/2026 at 3:02:00 PM

>and have staff at hand which could solve any solvable remaining issues like this one. They call the Home Office internal hotline, explain the issue, resolve it by manually interfering on the spot (and have a bug filed), and everyone carries on.

This may be possible some 15+ years ago. Home Office today is very different. Without a prober procedure written down I doubt this could be solved manually. Nor would anyone want to solve it manually.

by ksec

8/24/2026 at 3:08:50 PM

You have a written procedure. And after a long list of known/common things the procedure has an escalation clause that routes to an official with agency. You update the procedure as needed to manage the escalation rate.

This is extremely common

by lokar

8/24/2026 at 3:12:34 PM

I wish that was the case. Not something I have experienced personally.

by ksec

8/24/2026 at 3:16:50 PM

It seemed pretty standard at B2B tech providers. You have Sr support engineers who are the final line, and can often setup a reproduction in a test environment and file a good bug. Then you just count up the rate of tickets that hit that bug and require a manual fix. At some point it’s time to fix the bug.

by lokar

8/24/2026 at 3:46:37 PM

If the no human path is good enough for trillion dollar big tech companies ... why not for government.

I don't think it is good enough for either, but I also think we should practice, and run our companies, as we preach.

by blitzar

8/24/2026 at 4:53:29 PM

Because companies can choose their customers, and can choose not to serve some customers because they are too difficult/expensive, while a government can't ethically make the same choice. A government (at least a liberal democratic and republican government of, by, and for The People) serves all their citizens, it's kinda the point, whereas a company definitely maintains types of customers they are not interested in.

This is a fundamental problem with "running government like a business," one of several that point to the fundamental flaws of the entire idea (profit motive, unitary unit of execution, etc.).

by mandevil

8/24/2026 at 8:03:29 PM

> while a government can't ethically make the same choice

I'm glad you said "ethically" because the current US administration is openly admitting that they're making decisions on things like school funding, disaster relief based on whether that state went for Trump or not.

by FireBeyond

8/24/2026 at 5:01:51 PM

What I don't understand is why this isn't already the case. Every single EU(and UK!) airport I've ever been to has a fallback to agents sitting at nearby gates if the eGate fails to recognize you for any reason. It just says "please proceed to agent" and you get back in the queue for families with kids and non-EU citizens etc.

Why can't the same system work here?

by gambiting

8/24/2026 at 3:20:25 PM

“In the rare cases where errors are identified, the majority of cases are resolved within 24 hours.” The Home Office indicated the problem Webb encountered had since been fixed and that staff would contact her directly.

so yes, they can and do override the system.

Also the person wasn't stuck in the airport, they were denied boarding of the plane because there was an issue with their identification documentation.

It's not good, its a travesty that you even need an ID to fly between two european countries, let alone a visa, but the picture you paint is at odds with reality.

by iso1631

8/24/2026 at 5:02:57 PM

Welcome to the modern world.

I seem to recall a time when you could ring up, get through to a human that could actually solve your problem.

Now humans are just front ends for software, and there's noone to take responsibility.

I would put the blame more of systems and cost saving. They don't want humans to have any responsibility, or pay them for that.

by benj111

8/24/2026 at 10:19:10 AM

I've had issues with this e-visa implementation and was told I could not board flights.

As a someone in tech, I feel this a classic case study of how NOT to roll out a release and develop a solution.

The release was chaotic, none of the airlines staff were trained on how to use this. So they still insisted on the expired cards and then picked on the expiry dates.

Next, almost everyone makes you generate a verification share code in front of them by logging into the e-visa website even if the rules say I can print it out and just use the code. It takes a few minute to get on the website and generate one.

This solution assumed that everyone has access to a smart phone and a good wifi connection to make this work.

Whoever built this didn't test it on the ground.

by zabil

8/24/2026 at 10:27:56 AM

> Whoever built this didn't test it on the ground.

God this happens all the time. Software written by people that don't use the software themselves. It has happened to me so many times, I come across a piece of software with weird bugs or interactions that would be immediately fixed if the developer just spends 5 minutes using the software like an end user would. Dogfood all the things!

by RedShift1

8/24/2026 at 10:34:22 AM

> Software written by people that don't use the software themselves. It has happened to me so many times, I come across a piece of software with weird bugs or interactions that would be immediately fixed if the developer just spends 5 minutes using the software like an end user would. Dogfood all the things!

My experience is completely contrary: developers typically do care deeply about such things. The problem is rather that very commonly managers actively disallow these poor developers to apply their diligence to the software that they develop.

I really have a strong feeling that you want to participate in the ugly vendetta against software developers that has been going on for decades ("Replace all software developers"; current season: "Replace them with AI").

Don't do that. Rather fight the people who are really responsible (who are often (project) managers or Scrum masters).

by aleph_minus_one

8/24/2026 at 4:05:10 PM

Bugs caused by edge-cases in data are exactly the types of bugs that are usually not caught in smoke tests.

In my experience with large regulated systems, the engineers writing the software don't have the expertise to even know what the correct specifications should be in most cases, and especially in edge cases. Software engineers are not experts in customs and immigration legal requirements and would be relying on heavily on guidance from experts in those fields to determine the proper rules to apply.

In my experience with bugs like this, it is usually scenarios that all parties involved in the design did not consider... especially when implementation is rushed due to tight deadlines.

by kube-system

8/24/2026 at 6:52:57 PM

My experience is rather that the typical software developer is ultra-cautious, and will always leave some loophole open in the workflows of the software in case something unexpected occurs that could not be foreseen, in particular considering the high stakes that are involved when something goes wrong with the software: I am not exaggerating when I claim that if something like what is is described in the article happens to some people, they often will start praying to their god that he kills the responsible people for this bug in the software in the most brutal imaginable way. Software developers know that.

Other stakeholders typically don't apply such caution.

by aleph_minus_one

8/24/2026 at 8:22:09 PM

Yeah, the typical way to fix an unforeseen data issue is that someone is empowered to update the data manually on the backend which sounds like exactly what happened. That being a slow process is not a software engineering issue, but an organizational issue.

by kube-system

8/25/2026 at 12:05:34 AM

> That being a slow process is not a software engineering issue, but an organizational issue.

Business software is work processes that has been turned into code.

by aleph_minus_one

8/25/2026 at 12:28:57 AM

Yes, but the end users are not (yet) code, they are humans. In order to fix the data in the system, the organization will have to place a human behind the keyboard with the authority and ability to change the data from incorrect to correct.

by kube-system

8/25/2026 at 12:36:29 AM

> will have to place a human behind the keyboard with the authority [...] to change the data from incorrect to correct.

Whether such a person has such a permission in the system or whether the permission system of the software can actually model this is a work process that has been turned into code.

by aleph_minus_one

8/25/2026 at 12:44:05 AM

Yes, the permissions systems in software usually is built to reflect the reality of someone's job role.

by kube-system

8/24/2026 at 12:13:11 PM

Sometimes it's so painfully obvious - that you can turn a piece of crApp into something that works well by just modifying yourself or the situation so you're following the path that the developers do.

by bombcar

8/24/2026 at 1:17:11 PM

If CEOs were legally required to regularly use their own products as an ordinary customer, the world would be a better place.

by wat10000

8/24/2026 at 2:12:08 PM

Slightly off topic, but I strongly believe that the rise of "professional" CEOs was the beginning of the end for quality products and services. Before, you were generally an expert in your particular domain and was invested in solving the customer's problems.

by SaltyBackendGuy

8/24/2026 at 8:05:51 PM

I recently worked for a company in the cybersecurity space who hired a CEO who had neither IT, nor security, nor cybersecurity experience...

... I saw last week that they just had their (latest) 25% headcount reduction, followed by their (latest) "executive offsite retreat" to pat each other on the back and figure out what they'll do between now and the next one.

by FireBeyond

8/24/2026 at 7:01:26 PM

> If CEOs were legally required to regularly use their own products as an ordinary customer, the world would be a better place.

This is like the argument "developers should use the software that they write" (dogfooding).

Let me give one example: the previous person who designed and developed the previous version of the software which I now work on really could use "his" program insanely well. The problem was rather that he was basically the only person who really did understand it sufficiently well to not to be triggered by problems other users had. Yes, a huge part of my job is over the years to turn this piece of software into something that is understandable by other people, too,. :-)

by aleph_minus_one

8/24/2026 at 10:41:23 AM

"I really have a strong feeling that you want to participate in the ugly vendetta against software developers that has been going on for decades ("Replace all software developers"; current season: "Replace them with AI")."

Paranoia?

There are a lot of devs who don't really like what they develope so don't spend any time dogfooding it. Has nothing to do with devs who are blocked by management.

by lukan

8/24/2026 at 11:50:48 AM

No, while the patent poster expresses their opinion quite strongly I have more than once encountered product managers and project managers who get almost personally offended when developers try to use their brains and don't just blindly implement incorrect specifications. If they have a vendetta I don't know but they clearly hate having to depend on engineers with free will.

That said I have also encountered lazy engineers who are totally fine with implementing obviously broken software, those are a perfect match for the egotistical product manager.

by jeltz

8/24/2026 at 2:59:42 PM

Shoot where I am at, it can also change on a week by week basis. This week, I can get away with some shit to improve the UX and depart from the mock up. Next week, if the feature doesn't look and function just like the mock up says that was handed in the case, I'm in trouble. No matter how bad it is.

by tcmart14

8/24/2026 at 11:03:52 AM

> There are a lot of devs who don't really like what they develope so don't spend any time dogfooding it.

Note that in my comment I wrote nothing about dogfooding - for a very good reason:

It is well-known that dogfooding leads to software that has rather few bugs, but also dogfooded software often shows a tendency to be "biased towards programmers and power users". So, there often exist very good reasons if the programmers actively don't dogfood their software, and rather trust someone else (who is very trusted by the programmers) that the workflow that the programmer should implement does make sense for the user, even though most programmers would implement this aspect very differently.

by aleph_minus_one

8/24/2026 at 11:22:05 AM

Okay, so what I’m taking away and remembering here is that if I wrote software for programmers/“power users”, I should dogfood as much as possible, right? :-)

by msdz

8/24/2026 at 11:37:34 AM

> Okay, so what I’m taking away and remembering here is that if I wrote software for programmers/“power users”, I should dogfood as much as possible, right? :-)

Lessons that you should be taking away are rather:

- Every tool that possibly might be good for improving the quality of the software is just a tool that can also cause harm if used in a wrong way.

- Deeply distrust keynote speakers and thought leaders who sell their method for improving the quality of the software or improving software development as a panacea. Every method is only useful under specific circumstances and is harmful of used wrongly. Keynote speakers and thought leaders who don't go into details when their methods are helpful and when they are harmful are simply scammers and snake oil salesmen and should be called this.

by aleph_minus_one

8/24/2026 at 11:25:22 AM

Well, I think you should always do that(if your constraints let you). But working with actual users and valuing their input is to be prefered of course. Every user can be a power user if you give them the tools so they empower themself.

by lukan

8/24/2026 at 3:51:10 PM

I write software that we use daily, and we still find things in the wild that we would never find until the thing in the wild occurs. Luckily for me, none of these found in the wild issues interfere with people's lives and just means a file gets completed a little closer to the deadline. I'm fine with that.

Not sure if this situation falls under the "push it to prod and let the users QA it" or if this is truly edge case situations. It's easy to bash and make fun of, but I've been in the trenches of catching what is an edge case for most people but run of the mill for those providing the data to me.

by dylan604

8/24/2026 at 12:07:37 PM

I’ve been in the weird situation of working in a startup where the founder doesn’t use their own product. Needless to say I got out of there pretty quick.

by pennomi

8/24/2026 at 10:53:02 AM

I bet you 100% it was built not by in house team but farmed out to an agency for £££££ millions. They will have been saying in their case studies some absolute nonsense about how they saved the government millions rather than burned loads of money too.

by andy_ppp

8/24/2026 at 2:27:06 PM

and the sales people promised it would be 100% reliable.

by graemep

8/24/2026 at 10:54:08 AM

So did we, although we were in the end able to persuade them to let us board the flight by showing a screenshot of my friend's eVisa status from the UK government website (so secure!)

To be fair to the airlines here, if they get it wrong then the UK government fines the airline. This is why they are pretty risk averse, and also why I'm surprised that the screenshot worked.

by rwmj

8/24/2026 at 1:02:16 PM

If you would lie with screenshot, it is a forgery of official documents, and airline can sue you for damages.

by throw73849494

8/24/2026 at 12:03:43 PM

This is the classic difference between testing whether the software works and testing whether the system works

by MarceliusK

8/24/2026 at 1:43:27 PM

Also for years prior it was explicitly said share code were _not_ to be used for travels and that airlines were not allowed to ask for them.

And now that they are the airlines do not have the system to check them so you have to print the webpage which also explicitly said should _not_ be used instead of the share code...

by tym0

8/24/2026 at 10:25:10 AM

How did they roll it out embassy without having at least some old systemd or a human in the loop backup working?

by alphabeta3r56

8/24/2026 at 10:28:40 AM

> ... without having at least some old systemd ...

Back in my day, visas were handled by init scripts. And we like it that way!

by CoastalCoder

8/24/2026 at 10:32:26 AM

But with systemd you can start deportation procedures while waiting for the rest to resolve.

by JSR_FDED

8/24/2026 at 3:14:24 PM

> As a someone in tech

Computer says no.

by blitzar

8/24/2026 at 11:08:08 AM

> A Home Office spokesperson said: “Over 10 million people have already successfully used eVisas to prove their immigration status. ..."

So how many people did not successfully use it? Could be 100 million for all we know. Do they think just throwing out a large number without anything to compare it to is somehow proving something?

by poizan42

8/24/2026 at 1:34:21 PM

I would say what we do care about is the number of people who were not able to use the system successfully through no fault of their own. Even 0.001% failure rate is too high when is affects more than a few people per year. Especially so when there is no easy way to rectify the problem.

by citrin_ru

8/24/2026 at 11:16:38 AM

> Do they think just throwing out a large number without anything to compare it to is somehow proving something?

Welcome to the last 20 years of UK public policy communications. Politicians know that people do not question big numbers or have the skills to put them in context.

I remember the May government shouting that "more children go to schools rated good+ by Ofsted than ever before". Me and you would say, well, there's more children alive than ever before, so it's hardly an achievement.

by walthamstow

8/24/2026 at 12:00:30 PM

Without the total number of attempts, number of failures and ideally how those failures are distributed, it tells us almost nothing

by MarceliusK

8/24/2026 at 12:15:48 PM

There simply cannot have been that many border crossings that failed this way — the eVisa system has only been in force without any fallback alternatives for a few months and only four million people hold them anyway.

Proportionally speaking most of the failures will surely have been non-crossing uses (electronically proving right to work/receive benefits/not have to ultimately pay/claim on insurance for non-emergency care).

by dofm

8/24/2026 at 12:26:59 PM

Look, I'm robbing you but you have to consider that 99.9% of people never get robbed so really it's not something anyone should care about.

by micromacrofoot

8/24/2026 at 12:41:10 PM

[dead]

by cindyllm

8/24/2026 at 11:21:05 AM

It only launched in the middle of April (edit: middle of February was the switchover at the border where no other fallback would have been possible)

It sounds to me like this number indicates broad success.

The rough estimate seems to be that only about two per cent of border crossings use an eVisa anyway (British passport holders don't and non-immigrating visitors don't).

Even over summer that would probably only mean maybe 2.5 million border crossings, so the other uses are not at the border — they will instead be employment/landlord/benefit/healthcare checks using the online systems.

So for example, renting a new property, starting a new job, applying for a new benefit, or needing non-emergency healthcare etc.

by dofm

8/24/2026 at 11:35:42 AM

How? How can a single absolute number indicate broad success? You can't read from it if failure rate is 1% (completely unacceptable) or 0.01% (probably acceptable as long as problems are quickly mitigated). Also what do they even count as a success? If someone is stranded somewhere for a month and the problem then gets mitigated, they did eventually successfully use it, didn't they?

The strongest indicator that the system is riddled with issues is in what they did not say. If they had less than 100 cases where the system initially failed and the issues got resolved within a few hours I'd bet they would brag about it.

by poizan42

8/24/2026 at 11:55:40 AM

> If they had less than 100 cases where the system initially failed and the issues got resolved within a few hours I'd bet they would brag about it.

That's a bit of a straw man though isn't it — could there ever have been as few as a hundred problems in a system of this complexity with four million users?

(It also moves away from your "hundred million people" somewhat does it not?)

I am sure it has not been a flawless rollout but I don't really understand the outrage here.

It's worth understanding that much of the news media coverage of this is tinged with anger, regret and disappointment: this is a system we would not have needed in this formulation if we had not done Brexit.

Small problems with existing immigration and border systems would not have made any news but they could also have been happening at a higher rate, yes?

We shouldn't have done Brexit, but we do need a system, and therefore we have a system that is less joined-up than it could be.

by dofm

8/24/2026 at 12:11:29 PM

This is a question about numeracy, not "flawless rollouts." It certainly isn't a question about Brexit.

by pessimizer

8/24/2026 at 1:22:11 PM

Bias in media reporting is a factor here. That bias is driven in part by feelings about Brexit and about a system that exists in this form because of it.

Either way, the fact that it has been used ten million times successfully strongly suggests it is basically doing OK, since it's hard to imagine many more than ten million uses since the alternatives became unavailable.

Glad to have your obviously authoritative review of the subject, though. I am suitably chastened for trying to show the broader picture.

by dofm

8/24/2026 at 11:40:19 AM

The eVisa system launched on 1st Jan 2025 (https://righttoremain.org.uk/update-on-evisa-transition/).

by rwmj

8/24/2026 at 11:52:41 AM

I misread a thing. Actually the system went into force at the border in February — that is when people have only been using their eVisas instead of alternative methods, as it's when the border switched to using the readers.

The government did not even stop issuing physical visa stickers until the beginning of last month.

So again, this ten million figure does not seem to indicate a likelihood of massive, systemic failure.

If there has been massive failure, then I guess the government department and the two US tech multinationals (Accenture's global HQ is only in Dublin for tax purposes) will have to figure it out.

by dofm

8/24/2026 at 12:08:53 PM

It's older than that. It started in 2018. January 2025 was when the system became eVisa only.

In this case I suspect that either there was a recent mix-up or that person hasn't travelled since she came to the UK or got settled status and never noticed the problem.

EU citizens in the UK since before Brexit only got an eVisa when their status transitioned to "Settled status" for instance and never had anything in their passports. But as long as their online account is up-to-date (i.e. linked to current passport) they can even use the automated passport check gates on arrival into the UK. Only issue since ~last year and especially now that ETA is mandatory for non-residents is to prove status to airline staff on departure otherwise they deny boarding, this is done through online account.

by mytailorisrich

8/24/2026 at 12:02:08 PM

That does make the 10 million figure more meaningful but I still think it is doing a lot of work rhetorically

by MarceliusK

8/24/2026 at 2:31:19 PM

Why do you have to ask? Because you don't have easy access to the data. Whether or not your nation has a culture of honesty, big scale communication is always going to be dumbed down.

by threatofrain

8/24/2026 at 3:24:18 PM

What was the failure rate on the earlier system, the mean time to resolution, and the maximum time to resolution, and how does that compare with the current system.

by iso1631

8/24/2026 at 12:31:19 PM

Unfortunately there are more and more cases where "The computer says no" and then there is no human to talk to, and you are bounced back from one automated system to another...

I had recently a case where my title (Mr) ended up as my middle name in the system of the operating airline (it was perfectly correct in the system of the airline that I booked the ticket through). Two hours of talking to those two airlines did not help me. I had to buy another ticket...

I think this starts to remind me the movie Brazil...

by sega_sai

8/24/2026 at 10:49:11 AM

It'd be lovely if articles like this named the people responsible for actually building the systems. It's almost certainly never a government department.

They'll have paid one the many software/technology companies to build this thing. Who will be hiding their shoddy crap behind their client (the government department that paid for it). There are some patterns that I'm sure would start to arise from naming the consultancies that are churning out crap.

by chainier

8/24/2026 at 11:35:18 AM

Actually this was developed by the government, in a meaningful sense, but it seems like it's Entrust (more or less inevitably) and Accenture who are the outsourced parts.

So basically both US multinationals (Accenture have a Dublin HQ as a fig leaf)

by dofm

8/24/2026 at 12:06:47 PM

Accenture …that tracks

by tagyro

8/24/2026 at 11:14:00 PM

All software is going to have edge cases, no matter how good the contractor is. The decision to not have contingencies to manually handle reasonable edge cases is entirely on the government.

by jjk166

8/24/2026 at 12:36:35 PM

Would it make any difference? Fujitsu wrote software so buggy that innocent people got fined and put in prison. They still get contracts even today.

by Steve16384

8/24/2026 at 1:03:43 PM

My favorite part of the UK’s eVisa was taking a portrait photo of my 1.5y old.

I was losing my sanity over all the refusals (app refusing the photos).

by rkuska

8/24/2026 at 2:30:55 PM

> My favorite part of the UK’s eVisa was taking a portrait photo of my 1.5y old.

I have had to take photos of each of my two kids at six months old for passports. That was not a lot of fun (though it's nice to look at the baby photo for the older one now).

by disgruntledphd2

8/24/2026 at 3:27:43 PM

I had professional photographers (guy at timpsons) do it with when my kids were that age. Was a doddle and cost about £5

The hilarity of having to compare a baby picture with a 5 year old kid stood in front of you is a separate problem.

by iso1631

8/24/2026 at 8:14:34 PM

I am a UK citizen, born in Scotland, before 1983, to Scottish parents. We moved to Australia when I was young and I traveled on my mother's passport.

Now I live in the US.

The UK government has decided that to travel to the UK, a UK citizen MUST use a UK passport. They also, helpfully, don't offer passport services at their US embassies and consulates.

So the process is this: I begin the process on gov.uk, and validate my identity to them, to their satisfaction, using questions only I should know (where did my parents marry, born where and to whom, what time of the day). Once I have done that, I get to upload a passport photo of myself... and then I have to find, and nominate another UK citizen who -does- have a passport, -who is not related to me-, who "has known me for two years", and "has the risk of loss if they were to make a false statement", to go through the same process themselves, validate their identity, and then state that the photo they have seen is of me, that they have known me for two years or more, what the nature of our relationship is, and more.

Then the UK will issue my passport.

Fun story of the app refusals though, id.me, as used by the IRS:

"Scan the front and back of your Driver's License."

[upload scan of front of DL @ 200DPI]

"Unable to find a face in the image you uploaded."

[upload scan of front of DL @ 300DPI]

"Unable to find a face in the image you uploaded."

Huh. Maybe I'll try with a lower resolution.

[upload scan of front of DL @ 72DPI]

"Thank you, now please upload the back of your Driver's License."

Hmm, 72DPI worked for the front, so...

[upload scan of back of DL @ 72DPI]

"Unable to read a barcode in the image you uploaded."

[upload scan of back of DL @ 200DPI]

"Unable to read a barcode in the image you uploaded."

[upload scan of back of DL @ 300DPI]

"Thank you for verifying your Driver's License".

by FireBeyond

8/24/2026 at 8:56:06 PM

I've seen more and more instances of this. Sometimes it's a feature in disguise - humans are easier to spoof than software - but mostly it's laziness or cost cutting.

For example, I went to the bank down the road and tried to withdraw a few thousand dollars. This isn't atypical for me - I do this every few months. I had my ID and knew my account number, but I didn't have my debit card. They essentially told me "system says no" and that there wasn't anything they could do. This is a feature for the bank - a human teller might be talked into pressing the wrong button by fraud. Instead, I had to go home and get my debit card. By presenting that bit of plastic, system said yes, and I was good to go with my cash.

For another example, I was recently at an airport listening to a family struggling to get on a flight. They were checked in with seats assigned (confirmed by the gate agent) but the system refused to give the green "ok to board" light for them. Rather than just put them on the flight and file a ticket to fix the record after the fact, the agent just stood there churning for a while until a supervisor was able to sprint over from the other end of the airport. The supervisor didn't use their superior access level to override the broken system. Instead, they used their superior knowledge on how to push the system through its bug. They kicked the family off the flight, unassigned their seats, put them on standby, approved them for (random) empty seats, and then let them board... but now they weren't sitting together in the seats they had before. I ended up missing that (extremely delayed) flight for boring reasons related to ongoing engine problems and upcoming connections so I don't know how it worked out but I hope they got to sit together in the end!

by aftbit

8/24/2026 at 1:28:55 PM

The terrible part to me is them saying "the majority of cases are resolved within 24 hours", this should be like a 15-minute delay at most when you can present your passport with its number which also matches your biometrics (as would be the case with twins).

I myself recently had a 10-minute or so delay due to a visa issue. I was departing from Johannesburg and was going to use my Italian passport for entry into New Zealand. I had acquired an NZeTA visa about 15 months before but didn't think to consider until checking in that it was against my previous passport number which I had since renewed.

When the agent said they were just having to double check my visa (while my wife's and children' were fine), the fact the passport had been renewed occurred to me and I told the agent about it which probably saved a couple of minutes of them having to work out this was the issue. They phoned New Zealand, explained the situation and within about 10 minutes the New Zealand side updated their system and I was able to complete my check-in.

by jonathanlydall

8/24/2026 at 2:04:53 PM

The problem is there used to be a separate physical card (BRP), but the Home Office got rid of it and moved to this all digital system. In other words there is no backup method available to ground staff.

by rwmj

8/24/2026 at 10:07:27 AM

I have identical twin boys - when signing up for a bank account app and while completing all the associated hoops for ID, the second to do it got the rather dystopian error message 'an account has already been registered with this face'

by feintruled

8/24/2026 at 10:14:50 AM

I wonder how it's possible they didn't think about this problem. Considering everyone involved in building this feature, not a single person thought about the possibility of twins or simply people who are very alike? Also, can't people open multiple accounts?

by glimshe

8/24/2026 at 10:37:53 AM

I imagine that it probably went like this "what about identical twins?" / "Don't worry about that for now, we'll solve for it before we go live, but it's not in this milestone". Then someone pulls rank and decides the product is "good enough, we can't wait for all bugs to be fixed" and gets it deployed.

by another-dave

8/24/2026 at 11:07:38 AM

Issues get closed to make the metrics look good, not because they’re actually fixed.

by mr_toad

8/24/2026 at 10:23:53 AM

Just look at the "falsehoods programmers believe about ..." articles that pop up from time to time. There are plenty of complexities in the real world that people either don't know about, aren't front of mind when they are tackling a larger problem, or simply don't want to deal with in the here and now. Lost knowledge and new problems are part of the reason why programmers are discouraged from rewriting software from scratch and why businesses in general are hesitant to replace legacy systems that still work.

by II2II

8/24/2026 at 12:27:23 PM

That's true, but those lists are interesting because they aren't full of things you should be learning in primary school.

by globular-toast

8/24/2026 at 7:51:09 PM

True, but many of those bits would be learned in some primary schools. It simply depends upon whether they are relevant where you live. That's especially true for names, which is culturally dependent. It is also true for the culturally dependent aspects of dates/time, though there are obscure bits that are only relevant to certain disciplines.

by II2II

8/24/2026 at 11:00:50 AM

Based on my experience I assume someone mentioned the risk, others said it’s unlikely and only a small percentage, that we should care about the 99% for now. Then the issues isn’t revisited until someone impacted complains enough.

p99 is ok for web stuff, not for systems that impacts people in their life, but I’ve seen too often things being dismissed because they are edge cases (which becomes an actual real issue at the scale of a country of course)

by dgellow

8/24/2026 at 10:29:25 AM

Which is pretty absurd because twins aren’t even that uncommon. I would bet most people on the planet know or are related to twins.

by nkrisc

8/24/2026 at 12:18:28 PM

Every person on the planet is related to twins.

by hamper653

8/24/2026 at 12:22:55 PM

What a pointless point to make. I’ll spell it out for you: related within a generation or two. There are no twins in my family that I know of for several generations, for example. Thus I would say I’m not related to any twins because I’m not in any meaningful way, even if there might be twins somewhere in my ancestral history.

If you mean that all humans are related, that is true but a completely useless fact in this context.

by nkrisc

8/24/2026 at 1:30:40 PM

Not every word in a conversation needs to be useful.

by hamper653

8/24/2026 at 2:50:52 PM

Apparently not even entire replies, so I’ll join in with one.

by anon48293

8/24/2026 at 4:20:38 PM

Indeed.

by hamper653

8/24/2026 at 5:07:13 PM

Those are the ones better left unsaid.

by nkrisc

8/24/2026 at 10:19:04 AM

Because it probably does the dystopian tracking well enough, they don't care if it's not 100% accurate. Edge cases in the new world have no recourse, citizen.

by _joel

8/24/2026 at 1:20:43 PM

Maybe they didn’t care. Identical twins are a fraction of a percent of the population. Excluding them (really, only half of them) from the customer base wouldn’t hurt noticeably.

by wat10000

8/24/2026 at 11:20:29 AM

What is strange is that even the best face recognition algorithms have false positive. So surely they must have planned for two unrelated customers resolving to the same embeddings.

by cm2187

8/24/2026 at 12:09:02 PM

Anyone have any idea how this can happen? Surely the boys have different first names, so how can the system mix them up?

by ginko

8/24/2026 at 2:07:19 PM

One imagines they are far more worried about person X fraudulently claiming to be person Y than they are about occasionally causing problems for identical twins.

Obviously the solution is to accompany facial recognition with DNA tests.

by contubernio

8/24/2026 at 10:58:02 AM

One of the reasons I’m applying for a British passport. Existing purely in some mystery database like that seems risky long term

by Havoc

8/24/2026 at 11:55:33 AM

"Known issue" and "you may not board the flight home" really shouldn't appear in the same system. If a database error can effectively invalidate your legal status at the border, there needs to be a fallback that doesn't involve spending hours on the phone

by MarceliusK

8/24/2026 at 10:23:42 PM

“In the rare cases where errors are identified, the majority of cases are resolved within 24 hours.”

On whose dime?

"We regularly see people not only denied boarding, but also compensation,"

Oh.

by ChoGGi

8/24/2026 at 10:13:47 AM

The article doesn't give much more information than the title. Almost zero details.

by a022311

8/24/2026 at 1:30:36 PM

This sounds like a confused support agent. The system lacks a notion of twins - it doesn't link accounts via biometrics. The names are similar but not equal and the passport numbers would also be different, so how would their accounts be linked? Perhaps they used the same email when registering by mistake?

by Integer

8/24/2026 at 2:08:10 PM

Not sure if related, but the Spanish security kiosks are shockingly bad they had great difficulty reading faces, fingerprints, and even passports when held perfectly flat on their reading glass.

by xnx

8/24/2026 at 10:20:24 AM

I suspect this case has origins less to do with the programming itself, and more to do with UK bureaucracy just not giving a shit, as with the post office scandal where authorities, including the legal system, blindly believing in the outsourced systems led to hundreds of false prosecutions and thirteen suicides (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal).

by crooked-v

8/24/2026 at 10:56:34 AM

The Home Office does manage to be both cruel and incompetent, which is the worst possible combination.

by rwmj

8/24/2026 at 11:12:35 AM

It's the second worst.

by robertlagrant

8/24/2026 at 11:56:33 AM

[dead]

by fergie

8/24/2026 at 5:26:24 PM

The UK seems to be uniquely incompetent when it comes to these sorts of organizational tasks.

by ninalanyon

8/24/2026 at 2:28:53 PM

“Webb said Home Office staff promised her over the phone the problem would be fixed, though a confirmation email was then sent to her sister instead of to her.”

Comedy gold.

by leephillips

8/24/2026 at 1:50:46 PM

How did we let something as basic as money and travel become so controlled?

Laws against persona; freedoms should be called out as unethical.

by Razengan

8/24/2026 at 12:20:55 PM

Cue The IT crowd: Made in UK. Ah, it makes sense

by a012

8/24/2026 at 10:18:22 AM

[dead]

by hnjbx769kd

8/24/2026 at 10:33:45 AM

[flagged]

by gib444

8/24/2026 at 11:17:30 AM

It's more to do with Civil Service's hatred of working class.

by varispeed

8/24/2026 at 10:48:51 AM

oups.

by sam_lowry_

8/24/2026 at 10:58:30 AM

The story is about the British system not the EU one

by Havoc

8/24/2026 at 11:14:09 AM

She could have used a boat. Comes with a free hotel stay and no documents needed.

Jokes aside, when helping someone I know return to the UK, I wasn't sure if I have a stroke or someone who wrote the guidance had a lobotomy.

Clear as mud.

by varispeed

8/24/2026 at 11:56:01 AM

To be fair, the rules are insane. There are several different ways in which you might be or become a British citizen, and there are five other kinds of British (non-citizen) nationality. Irish citizens are in a category of their own. And then there's rules for other EU citizens and per-country rules for everyone else.

by masfuerte

8/24/2026 at 11:20:19 AM

[flagged]

by slaw

8/24/2026 at 2:37:47 PM

Edge case that needs fixing. Move on.

by vermooten

8/24/2026 at 4:21:56 PM

No, it's a basic exception like lap years.

by mdp2021