At Rome's FCO airport there is a facial recognition passport control for flights outside of the EU. Last time I left the EU, my aging passport's chip refused to

At Rome's FCO airport there is a facial recognition passport control for flights outside of the EU. Last time I left the EU, my aging passport's chip refused to work and a person made me retry 5 times before letting me go to the human passport control. It must be said that the non-European, non-biometric passport control can easily take 30 minutes longer. I have to say that I've never thought about this in terms of databases, I somewhat assumed that they were only matching against the local copy in my passport, but maybe someone can elucidate for me on how this works on EU passports.