After more than a year of anticipation, Residential Life debuted their new online housing registration system Wednesday morning, only to have the program crash and be forced to shut down after less than an hour in operation. As a result, registration priorities for apartment housing have been pushed back a day.

Current residents of Hillside and Susquehanna communities were scheduled to begin registration at 8 a.m., but when they logged on error messages began to pop up on computer screens. By 9 a.m. the site was taken completely offline, said Chris Cullinane, associate director of Residential Life.

While a few students were able to register in the morning, according to Cullinane, the traffic between the system’s Web server and the database was too much to handle and caused the system to fail within the first few minutes of operation.

“It was our biggest concern and we thought we were scaled to meet the demand,” he said. “Sure enough, when we turned it on, we had some problems.”

Residential Life sent e-mails to students eligible to register during the first priority to let them know about the problem.

“We spent the morning and afternoon working on it with some colleagues over at the computing center,” Cullinane said.

While the link to the registration Web site was removed from the Residential Life Web site, the program was re-activated in the afternoon in order to test the system. During that time more students were able to register and by the end of the day the number of students able to register for apartment housing reached 235.

“We had taken the link off the home page but apparently students had saved the page in their browsers and were able to get to it anyway,” he said. “I think students are used to doing things online and have become pretty savvy with this stuff.”

The first priority, which was scheduled to run Wednesday, was re-run on Thursday and the number of registered students climbed to 363.

Registration for the buildings was scheduled to end on Friday. Now, however, some students will have to wake up at 8 a.m. on Saturday to try to gain entrance into the communities.

“We’d like to apologize to all the students who have to get up on Saturday morning to register now,” Cullinane said. “We know that’s not fun. At least they can stay home though.”