9:20 am, October 2, 2014
THE DVLA’s new system buckled under what it called ‘unprecedented demand’ on the first day without paper tax discs.
Motorists were so keen to use the new system that more than 270,000 renewed their vehicles tax yesterday, up 30,000 on the same day last year. This resulted in the website crashing and yesterday morning the DVLA posted this tweet.
We are currently experiencing high volumes of traffic to our online vehicle tax service please keep trying. Sorry for the inconvenience.
— DVLA (@DVLAgovuk) October 1, 2014
According to the DVLA, at 9.43pm on Tuesday it was receiving 6,000 visits a minute but when the new rules came in yesterday it was inundated with visitors.
A DVLA spokeswoman told Sky News: “We can confirm that the unprecedented demand for car tax online temporarily affected the services provided by Vodafone to DVLA.
“Vodafone’s engineers worked hard with us to resolve the issue as quickly as possible and the service has now been restored. Vodafone will continue to monitor the service closely and will be carrying out a full investigation into the issue.”
