A-level students were unable to find out if they had a place in university last Thursday when UCAS, a registered charity, had to shut down part of its website due to a higher than anticipated increase in traffic.

The UCAS Track section of the website was inaccessible for more than an hour meaning students could not check whether their university place had been confirmed.

UCAS said that the disruption was caused by a fourfold increase in traffic to the website. It said it had planned and tested for a threefold increase.

Last Friday chief executive, Mary Curnock Cook, said: “We regret having had to take one of our services offline for a short time yesterday and the disruption this caused for those affected.”

She added: “We gradually ramped up our services from mid-morning yesterday to avoid the risk of overloading the system after unprecedented demand that saw log in traffic peak at 644 attempts per second.”

All services were working properly by Thursday evening and the ability to make Clearing choices opened as planned.

This year the number of applicants increased by 1.3 per cent but the number of places available remained roughly the same with 20,000 young people expected to miss out on a place all together.