Border police won’t publish Schiphol e-gate investigation

Hundreds of people missed their flights and thousands more faced long delays at Schiphol on Sunday after all 78 of the airport’s automatic passport gates went down at around 6am.

The Royal Marechaussee, the military police force responsible for border checks, said the outage was caused by an IT malfunction and that there was “no indication whatsoever” of a cyberattack.

The exact cause is still being investigated, but the results will not be made public, Marechaussee head of press, Major Mike Hofman, told Dutch News.

“For operational reasons, we do not comment regarding the further configuration, operation and technical details of our systems,” he said.

With the e-gates down, everyone flying to or from a country outside the Schengen area had to be checked manually by hand, including passengers in transit. The Marechaussee opened every desk and carried out less thorough checks to keep the queues moving.

Passengers waited an hour on average, and some waited up to an hour and a half, Schiphol officials said. The gates were working again by around 3pm.

KLM held departures where possible, and Transavia said it would be flexible with rebookings. A claims specialist told the Telegraaf the number of people affected in some way could run into the tens of thousands.

Few are likely to receive compensation, experts told the paper, because the outage will probably count as force majeure since the e-gates are run by the Marechaussee, not the airlines. The Marechaussee said travellers who missed their flights should contact their airline.

The outage happened during one of the busiest weekends of the autumn, as the one-week October school holiday began in the middle and south of the country and ended in the north. The Amsterdam marathon on Sunday also attracted thousands of runners to the city from all over the world.