Technology failed the Madhyamik test on Wednesday.

A web host jumped the gun and gave a sneak peek into the results before they were officially declared and almost all sites crashed under the weight of online traffic, forcing students to fall back on the time-tested method of craning their necks in front of the school notice board.

A phone call at 7.30 in the morning from a friend who said the Madhyamik results were already available on tathyabangla.com sent Arnab Chowdhury scurrying out of his Barasat home. By the time he reached the friend’s house, the site was inaccessible.

A student of PSC Government School, Arnab remained on tenterhooks for three hours before his school put him out of his misery. “I knew that the results were out but I didn’t know mine until 11am. It was agonising, though I knew that I would pass,” he said.

This is the second consecutive year that results came up on the Net before the scheduled time. An inquiry by the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education into last year’s leak revealed that the agencies that had access to the results beforehand were careless.

“We have not received any report on a leak this year. All the service providers had been informed that they were not to publish the results till 10am. We will look into it anyway,” Mamata Ray, the president of the board, said.

The official website of the board — www.wbbse.org — contained the message “Results of Madhyamik 2008 awaited” even two hours after they were officially declared. When the results were posted, the site could not be accessed. It wasn’t until 4pm that students could log in.

The board issued a statement in the evening saying that the technical staff actually stopped uploading the results on hearing that a television channel had reported “a leak”. A snag added to the delay.

“We are sorry about the inconvenience caused by the delay,” Ray said.

Telecom operators that were to provide the results did not fare any better. There was no response from some of the numbers provided by the board — 125560 and 1250102 (BSNL), 51234 (Reliance), 12900 (Tata Indicom) and 52435 (Aircel) — while the rest did not seem to exist.