The Big Give has relaunched its match challenge this morning after the site crashed at launch yesterday, leaving hundreds of charities and their supporters waiting for their promised matched donation opportunity.

The Big Give website crashed after launching at 10am on Monday due to a problem with one of the safeguards the organisation had put in place, its managing director Ashley Bowe told civilsociety.co.uk.

Bowe said the volume of visitors was not the cause of the failure of the challenge site yesterday, which was months in the making. “We fully anticipated the number of people, but there was a small error on our part,” he said.

The cause of yesterday’s problem has now been fixed, said Bowe, but the payment page is reportedly running slowly this morning. A recent tweet from the Big Give reported: “Donations are going through, a nationwide issue with 3D secure, please, please keep trying! Thank you so so much for your patience!”

This same problem caused a slowdown in the first hour of last December’s Big Give match challenge, and as a result Bowe said that the organisation had been particularly aware of the issue, worked to counter it and had identified the problem yesterday within an hour.

He said that the Big Give decided to postpone the launch until today and spread out the match funds over the next four days out of a sense of fairness to the charities involved, in order to allow them to regroup and rally their supporters once again.

The Big Give Christmas Challenge this year involves more than 450 charities, all of which had raised pledges from major donors and trustees in order to qualify to participate in the online donation initiative. The campaign sees donations made to the selected charities on the Big Give website during Christmas matched pound-for-pound by £1m put forward by the Reed Foundation and a further £900,000 donated by various other major donors, as well as the money pledged by individual charities’ own major donors and trustees.

Charities vent on social media

Charities which had prepared supporters to donate on the Big Give site yesterday turned to Twitter, Facebook and forums to vent their frustration and share updates, but Bowe said that generally the charities involved understood that Big Give was working to fix the problems.

“On the whole the reaction from charities was incredible – really, really understanding,” he said.

This year’s Big Give Christmas Challenge is the fourth annual match fund, and aims to raise a record £10m in matched gifts over the next four days.

This is the second time the site has crashed in its four-year history, crashing when it first launched in 2008. Last year the scheme raised £9m, with £1m going in the first 45 minutes of the campaign being launched. The initiative has in total raised more than £20m for charities.