1901 online census still crippled

The Public Record Office (PRO) is still struggling to cope with relentless demand for the online version of the 1901 census, which went live on Tuesday. The website is now accessible but access is inconsistent and often slow.

A spokesman for QinetiQ, the company that built the system, said: "The site was designed for an average of 1.2 million hits per day but there is an average of 1.2 million hits per hour and it's not letting up.

"It is more busy at some times than others, when the US logs on at 4pm for example. And once the UK has gone to sleep, Australia wakes up so demand is constant."

QinetiQ, which won the £7m contract to digitise the census in November 1999, is now in urgent meetings to discuss how it will address the problem. It expects demand to fall back but, in the interim, it is working with its service provider, BT Ignite, to increase bandwidth to the site.

"The site is more than about showing pages of data. It is a searchable database so it can't just be mirrored in the way a normal site could be," the spokesman said.

The 1901 census records for England and Wales are supposed to be available online as a searchable database of more than 32 million people. The database links to digital copies of original census pages and can be searched by name, address, institution or place.

But worldwide interest from people wanting to find out what their ancestors were up to 100 years ago has been overwhelming ever since the site went live on Tuesday.

One frustrated user said: "In common with many family historians, we have awaited with great anticipation this much-heralded event and have been extremely disappointed to see yet another failure of a government IT project, this time involving customers throughout the world.

"[Users] are being blamed by PRO and QinetiQ for wanting to access a site which has been hyped by the government for two years."

The census can be found here, if you're lucky.