German passports are valid 10 years. When my previous one was maybe 7 years old, to my surprise UK border control told me, your chip is dead. He was very friendly and said that's not a problem.
I never traveled to any country with less friendly border control after that, partly it were pandemic years anyway. But I wouldn't want to experience such surprise at the US border or probably many others, too.
I have no idea where, when, and how the chip got damaged. The passport was only used a couple of weeks every year. It had never been soaked, heated, frozen, severly bent or otherwise mechanically damaged. Once it got a bit moist at a sweaty bike trip in the mountains.
As embedded SW engineer I'd say: It's always the hardware :)
Cost of replacement is not relevant as the chip and passport are linked, so need a new passport to get that fixed. Not terribly costly. But annoying given that, like you, it is due to no obvious fault on my part.
However it seems pretty routine. All the face-scanning readers eventually (after several attempts and failures) bubble you up into to a process exception that refers you to a human and you get sent into another queue: this time, to be reviewed by a human.
Unless border control are particularly by the book, most of them will simply accept the explanation, and let me directly into the human queue. Sometimes this works out for the better — for all their cleverness, the automated scanners seem particularly tricky for them to keep working reliably. Other times there's lots of families travelling, and I end up waiting a bit longer.
Either way, I'm glad that most of them are alive enough to the issue that time consuming try/fail/repeat/escalate/re-queue part of the process can be skipped.
German passports are valid 10 years. When my previous one was maybe 7 years old, to my surprise UK border control told me, your chip is dead. He was very friendly and said that's not a problem.
I never traveled to any country with less friendly border control after that, partly it were pandemic years anyway. But I wouldn't want to experience such surprise at the US border or probably many others, too.
I have no idea where, when, and how the chip got damaged. The passport was only used a couple of weeks every year. It had never been soaked, heated, frozen, severly bent or otherwise mechanically damaged. Once it got a bit moist at a sweaty bike trip in the mountains.
As embedded SW engineer I'd say: It's always the hardware :)