Times Crossword Championships... Not

You may recall from this post that today was to be Times Online Crossword Championship day.

 Early this morning the Times Crossword Club site looked like this...

The contest was due to start at 10:30.... But by 10:10 the page looked like this...

Yes it was unable to cope with the load - as I had predicted on Crossword Central....

No I wasn't being a cynic. They hadn't stress-tested their system. If it hasn't been designed to scale to the number of competitors, they probably wont be able to get it to work. They've rescheduled it for the same time tomorrow. Let's hope they've added enough processing power!