RELATED: UC application deadline extended after 'technical difficulties', University of California says
For three hours, on the eve of a critical deadline Sunday night, parents and students trying to submit applications received a frightening message: "System Offline."
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"It the height of it, you get this moment of panic," said one parent, who was trying to help his daughter submit the all-in-one online application for all UC campuses.
"You're suddenly calculating in your head, I've got potentially 30 hours to go and this window is closing."
The glitch was soon confirmed with a UC tweet apologizing for the "outage."
An hour later, there was another UC tweet, announcing the deadline for applications would be extended, to Friday Dec. 4 at midnight.
However, they encourage students to apply as soon as possible, instead of waiting until the last day.
"However, we do encourage applications to be submitted as soon as possible! If you can, please don't wait to apply until the new deadline date," UC said in a follow-up tweet.
RELATED: University of California eliminates SAT, ACT testing as admissions requirement for freshman students
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"When we found out last night that UC was extending four extra days, it was shocking. We've never seen that happen before," said Susan Kjorlien, an independent college counselor based in Lafayette.
Today in a statement, Stett Holbrook, Senior Communications Strategist with the UC Office of the President explained:
"The outage stemmed from an issue with one of our servers. In the meantime, we have taken additional measures to ensure the system performs well while continuing to closely monitor it."