Lim said the real issue is that a critical national immigration system failed again, forcing manual processing and leaving thousands of travellers caught in massive queues nationwide.

“The home minister must immediately disclose the root cause of the recent outage, the actual number of travellers and entry points affected, and the present status and completion deadline for the National Integrated Immigration System (NIISe),” he said in a statement.

He said the minister must also explain the concrete measures being taken to prevent another nationwide disruption before the NIISe, intended to boost the department’s capability, is completed.

“NIISe was launched in 2021 to replace MyIMMs and was then expected to be fully operational by 2024. Yet in 2026, Malaysia is still relying on an ageing system that can paralyse border operations for hours.

“After years of billion-ringgit procurement, termination, re-procurement and cost revision, apologies are no longer enough,” he said.

Yesterday, the home ministry said a nearly four-hour-long disruption to the MyIMMs system on Wednesday was not caused by a cybersecurity breach.

It said the disruption that left tens of thousands stranded at entry points nationwide was caused by an internal technical issue that affected the system’s operations.

The ministry also apologised and said the system was fully restored and resumed normal operations 45 minutes after recovery works were completed.

The latest MyIMMs system crash on Wednesday, a public holiday, was the second in just over a month after a similar incident on April 23 left thousands of travellers stranded for about two hours.

Immigration director-general Zakaria Shaa­ban had reportedly said such disruptions could recur until the NIISe was up and running, and that the department will have to “endure them” until the new system is ready.

Lim said such answers were unacceptable and that “Malaysia cannot run 21st-century borders with a 30-year-old system and 30-year-old excuses”.