As on the day of the Higher Secondary results, technology let down students who had eagerly logged in on Thursday to find out whether they had cracked the joint entrance test.

The five websites that were to display the results crashed under the weight of online traffic, keeping students on tenterhooks for over two hours after the results were declared at noon.

“I kept trying to access the websites for over two hours, but the pages wouldn’t load on the PC. I gave up after that,” said Debashish Mukherjee, who came to know that he was ranked third in the medical entrance only when news channels started to announce the names of the toppers.

The West Bengal Joint Entrance Examination Board admitted that students faced problems in accessing the websites because of heavy traffic.

“We called in engineers from BSNL immediately after receiving a few complaints about the websites not functioning. They restored the system within 20 minutes and the sites were up and running by 1pm,” board chairman Siddhartha Dutta said.

For students who had trouble accessing their HS results too, it was a case of one agonising wait too many. “I was kept waiting for my HS result last month, and again on Thursday. This time, I had to wait for three hours. I wonder how the IIT websites cope with heavy traffic. I could easily access those when the IIT joint entrance results were declared a few weeks ago,” said Behala resident Indranil Bhattacharya, who saw his state JEE score only at 3pm.

While the Calcutta Telephones site, www.calcuttatelephones.com, informed students that the results would be displayed only after 2pm, other sites like www.wbresults.co.in and www.wbjeeb.in carried the standard error messages.

The board had formed a committee of experts from various universities to create and monitor the various websites.

“The server of a website that attracts numerous hits every minute must have the capacity to withstand such heavy traffic. If the capacity is not high, the website will invariably crash when too many people are trying to log in at the same time,” said Ashish Bhattacharyya, a former chairman of admissions at IIM Calcutta.