Paris: France banned all travel from the UK for 48 hours from midnight Sunday, including trucks carrying freight through the tunnel under the English Channel or from the port of Dover on England's south coast.
French officials said the pause would buy time to find a "common doctrine" on how to deal with the threat, but it threw the busy cross-channel route used by thousands of trucks a day into chaos.
The Port of Dover tweeted Sunday night that its ferry terminal was "closed to all accompanied traffic leaving the UK until further notice due to border restrictions in France."
Read: UK holds crisis talks as virus sweeps through
Truck drivers found themselves stranded near the port.
One of them showed the food supplies he will have to rely on for the next few days.
This is at a time of huge economic uncertainty for the UK, less than two weeks before it leaves the EU's economic structures on December 31, and with talks on a new post-Brexit trade relationship still deadlocked.
British prime minister Boris Johnson has said there's no evidence that the new form of the virus is more lethal or causes more serious illness than the existing strain, or that vaccines will be less effective against it.
AP Report
