The outage at Schiphol's electronic passport gates ended on Sunday. The Royal Netherlands Marechaussee said around 2:30pm that all eGates were working again. A spokesperson called it an ICT failure, not a cyberattack. The exact cause is still being investigated.

The fault began at 6am. All 78 automatic gates were unusable. Travellers went to desks for manual checks. The marechaussee put extra staff on every desk. Sunday fell in the autumn holiday: queues at arrivals and departures, about an hour on average, up to an hour and a half at the peaks.

KLM waited for passengers where it could. Schiphol said several hundred people missed flights. How many exactly, the airport could not say. Transavia said it would be extra flexible on rebooking. Schiphol did not change its advice to arrive three hours early for flights outside Europe.

eGates are for travellers aged 14 and over from the EU and Schengen, plus countries such as the UK, the US and South Korea. The passport is scanned, the face goes to a camera. When they fail, all extra-Schengen traffic goes to a person.

The marechaussee statement is a second, official source. There is no confirmed hack and no final tally of missed flights. Until an internal report, it remains a Sunday outage, fixed in the afternoon, with queues and hundreds of broken connections.

The gates are up. The cause is not. For anyone who stood an hour in line, that is today's story. For the inquiry, it only starts here.

Image: HJ Mitchell, queues at Schiphol security control, June 2022, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons; an archive, not the 18 October 2026 outage.

Sources consulted: Electronic passport control outage at Schiphol resolved - NOS; Self-service passport control outage at Schiphol - Royal Netherlands Marechaussee.