All 78 Passport Gates Fail at Schiphol: About 1,000 Travellers Miss Their Flights

Sunday, 6am, Amsterdam Schiphol. The self-service passport gates, all 78 of them, go dark. From that moment every traveller leaving for a country outside the Schengen area has to queue for a border guard with a stamp.

The Royal Netherlands Marechaussee, which runs border control, switched to manual checks and pulled staff from other posts in the airport, which created queues there too. Travellers reported waits of up to an hour and a half. It was autumn half-term, and Schiphol expected 234,000 passengers that day, counting departures, arrivals and transfers.

“Dit mag nooit meer gebeuren.”

“This must never happen again.”

— Marnix Fruitema, chairman of the airline association BARIN

“Airlines have had enough”

KLM and Transavia said they held flights for as many passengers as they could. Even so, about 1,000 people missed their flight or rebooked, RTL Nieuws reported. Transavia said it was being more lenient than usual with rebooking.

The fault was fixed on Sunday afternoon. A Marechaussee spokesman said it was probably caused by an IT failure, not a hack. “This was an exceptionally long outage for us. We are going to investigate the cause,” he told RTL. Airports in Rotterdam and Eindhoven had no problems, because they do not use e-gates.

The airlines’ trade body was furious. BARIN chairman Marnix Fruitema said airlines are fed up and urged the Marechaussee not just to investigate the cause but to fix it. The Dutch news site @NUnl posted video of the long lines on X.