After a computer glitch caused two days of delay, university technicians said the website that allows continuing students to sign up for the university-owned housing lottery will be ready for use today at noon.

George Gregg, Information Systems Manager for the UCSB Housing and Residential Services (HRS), said the department plans to stress test its web server this morning before reopening the site for student usage. Gregg said several hundred students use the site per year, but Internet traffic was not the cause of the system crash.

“I was informed by my technical team that they did in fact identify the problem this afternoon, and we have every reason to expect that we will be able to successfully reopen the application tomorrow at noon as is stated on our website,” Gregg said.

At press time, Gregg could not be reached to say what caused the error, but he said HRS technicians had contacted Microsoft representatives for technical support.

“It was completely unexpected because this is the very same unchanged [website] application we ran last year and we are very puzzled,” Gregg said.

HRS originally planned to make the website available to students Feb. 1 at 8 a.m., and fliers posted in residential halls and dining commons said the first 1,000 people to sign up would be guaranteed rooms next year.

Although the original deadline to enter the lottery was Feb. 15, HRS Executive Director Wilfred Brown said the department will extend the closing date until Feb. 17. If the website is not ready for usage today, HRS will extend the deadline for as many days as the service is down, Brown said.

Some students said they were inconvenienced by the unavailability of the site. Paul Maier, a first-year physics major, said he missed a lab because he was waiting to sign up for the lottery.

“We had to wait indefinitely for them to get their act together,” he said.

First-year political science major Jaymes Johnson said he and his friends woke up early to be the first people to fill out applications.

“You just want to hurry up and get it over with,” Johnson said.

Gregg said HRS apologizes to all students who were inconvenienced and frustrated by the server problem.