Technical troubles that took the Common App portal offline for two hours Monday night were met with anxiety and mordant humor by students and college officials.
For thousands of students anxiously trying to apply to colleges, it must have felt like disaster: Just before midnight on Monday, with barely 48 hours to go before the early deadline at many colleges, the web portal used by more than a million students a year started balking, and then shut down completely.
The Common Application, the nonprofit organization that runs the web portal, posted on Twitter Monday night that, because of “technical difficulties,” it was taking the application system off line for two hours to make repairs.
Many students, admissions officers, guidance counselors and teachers reacted to the shutdown with snark and a strong dose of gallows humor. Many of them postponed their bedtimes.
Were Russian hackers to blame? That was a popular joke among admissions officers, according to Jim Rawlins, director of admissions at the University of Oregon. “Either the Russians, or one of their competitors that’s just jealous of them,” Mr. Rawlins said on Tuesday.
University officials were taking the problem seriously, he said, but “on the other hand, we figure if we can laugh with them, it will reduce the stress” for prospective students.
Applicants were not shy about venting in response to the Common App outage. “Scariest thing that’s ever happened to me on Halloween,” wrote one Twitter follower named Michelle.
Another, using the handle Lost Hussein, was so outraged by the evident failure of digital technology in a supremely digital age that only capital letters would do: “Does AMAZON Shut Down Hours Before Christmas? Does it Crash?”
Jennifer Dart, a spokeswoman for the Common App, said on Tuesday that the portal ran into trouble because of “unusually large and intermittent spikes in system activity.” She offered an apology to all those affected, saying that “the last thing we want is to add any more stress” to the college application process.
According to the Common App Twitter feed, the portal was down from 11:30 p.m. Eastern time Monday until 1:30 a.m. Tuesday. Some users, however, said problems persisted after that time.
Ms. Dart said the site uses Amazon Web Services to allow it to handle high volumes of traffic when needed, but “what we experienced yesterday was not a server capacity issue.”
Monday night was not the first time the Common App portal has had problems. Technical snags left students struggling to send in applications in the autumn of 2013, and in response, some universities delayed their early submission deadlines.
Ms. Dart said she was not aware of any college extending its Nov. 1 deadline this year. To make the deadline, an application must be submitted by 11:59 p.m. Wednesday in the applicant’s local time zone.
Over all, Ms. Dart said, about 104,200 applications and more than 700,000 recommendations were submitted in the 24 hours through midday Tuesday, comparable with the same period a year earlier. Just under half of all first-year applicants last year applied early, she said, though Nov. 1 is not the early deadline at every college. The regular application deadline is in mid-January.
Kent Rinehart, dean of admissions at Marist College, said that along with the Common App web outage, there have been delays in sending high school transcripts through Naviance, a system used by high school guidance counselors. The problems did not appear to be related.
Naviance said in a statement that it was working on the issue.
“The worry is that we haven’t even reached the peak of activity,” Mr. Rinehart said on Tuesday. “That peak will likely be tomorrow.”
The Common App is meant to streamline the college admission process by allowing students to fill out one standard application and submit it to many schools, though some of the more than 700 colleges and universities that accept the Common App also require students to submit an additional essay or other material.
Animated GIFs were a popular way to convey on social media how it felt to be unable to apply while the web portal was down: the scream, the tear, the faint, the overweight basketball player flopping on his belly as he attempted a shot.
In a more conciliatory spirit, a student named Kenna offered a confession and an affirmation: “I believe in you Common App. It’s O. K. to be the scapegoat of students who didn’t start earlier, and I didn’t.”
Mr. Rawlins of the University of Oregon said that students should try not to worry too much. “There’s so much hype around getting this done, it’s understandable there would be stress,” he said. “If they’re in a different time zone, we’re going to err toward midnight on their side. We don’t care about the seconds, just in case you’re curious.”
