Mr Pursglove assured MPs that “all security checks” were maintained throughout the outage. “Border security was not compromised at any point and there is no indication of malicious cyber activity. Police access to operational systems was unaffected,” he said.

He said he “sincerely apologised” for the disruption to passengers and pledged he would be “unswerving” in his determination to ensure every lesson was learned “to ensure this does not happen again.”

He told MPs there was a “permanent fix” for the “technical issues within the Home Office network” which caused the failure.

The e-gates system has failed previously, in a similar way at the start of the May bank holiday weekend in 2023, and three times in two months in 2021.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “eGates at UK airports came back online shortly after midnight on Wednesday morning.

“As soon as engineers detected a wider system network issue at 19:44pm on Tuesday night, a large scale contingency response was activated within 6 minutes.

“At no point was border security compromised and there is no indication of malicious cyber activity.

“We apologise to travellers caught up in disruption and thank our partners, including airlines for their co-operation and support.”