The Department of Education experienced ten times the normal traffic on its website yesterday, causing its online system to temporarily crash and deny parents and teachers access to the first publication of school inspection reports.
The department website, which normally receives about 4,000 hits daily, recorded 40,000 hits by early afternoon yesterday. This followed a morning in which the site crashed and left parents and members of the public struggling to gain access for some hours.
A spokeswoman for Minister for Education Mary Hanafin said there had been intermittent breaks in the online service throughout the morning but all problems were resolved by lunchtime. "There has been unprecedented demand on the system, and inevitably this would have slowed the system," she said.
Department of Education officials blamed the early morning crash on the volume of traffic and the considerable size of each downloadable whole school evaluation document.
Yesterday marked the first time school inspection reports were brought into the public domain by the chief inspector. Each of the reports contained a summary of the main strengths and areas for development identified in the work of the school or in the teaching of a subject. Having carefully orchestrated the landmark publication of 128 inspection reports for some months, the department failed however to anticipate the extent of public interest.
The technical problems on the website continued until lunchtime yesterday, by which time the department's IT unit succeeded in creating increased capacity on the site.
Members of the public who contacted the department to complain, received specific domains which enabled them to log on without first going to the main website.