Self-assessment tax site crashes out on deadline day

Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs (HMRC) has been forced to extend the deadline for filing self-assessment tax returns online after the website crashed due to the number of people trying to file their returns before the 31 January deadline.

Photo stories

Check out silicon.com's latest photo stories here…

1. Photos: Zoom in on London from the air…
2. Photos: What should be crowned the king of Apple cool?
3. Photos: Virgin goes Galactic for SpaceShipTwo
4. Photos: When tech chiefs rock out...
5. Photos: Apple flying high at Macworld
6. Photos: Bill Gates puts on a show at CES
7. Photos of the year
8. Photos: Future tech at Microsoft Innovation day
9. Photos: The super 3D body scanner
10. Photos: The best of Google Sky

During the morning and early afternoon users trying to access the Self Assessment Online section of the HMRC website were confronted with the message "Online Service Temporarily Unavailable".

A silicon.com reader unable to get onto the Self Assessment site contacted the HMRC helpline and was told the problem was due to the high volume of people trying to access the service.

Anyone who failed to file their tax return online before midnight on 31 January was facing a £100 penalty but HMRC has now extended the deadline.

An HMRC spokesman told silicon.com the organisation takes disruption of any service very seriously and to reflect this, the self-assessment deadline has been extended by 24 hours to midnight on Friday 1 February.

The spokesman said: "HMRC's Self Assessment online filing service has experienced technical difficulties this morning which has meant that some tax payers have experienced difficulties filing online. The system is now rapidly returning to normal levels of service. A record number of 3.6 million taxpayers have already successfully filed online with 104,000 filing today."

In 2007, around three million people used the website to submit their tax return self assessments.

The system is part of the government ecommerce service, Government Gateway, which was updated last October to cope with future growth and to allow for usage peaks such as tax-filing deadlines.