The Solicitors Regulation Authority has admitted that a software bug caused the ‘volume issues’ that prevented some solicitors from renewing their practising certificates through the mySRA website last week.

The regulator said that the problem had been resolved and that extra capacity will be added to the site to enable larger numbers of solicitors to access it at any one time.

An SRA spokeswoman told the Gazette that a piece of computer code had been identified on Friday that was ‘checking and double-checking’ some information every five seconds.

She explained that as a result, the system thought more users were accessing it than in fact were and that it had reached its capacity and was overloading.

She said that one of the two servers was ‘decommissioned’ while the problem was fixed and tested, but it had now been recommissioned.

The spokeswoman said: ‘The system is working quite well at the moment.’

But she said that in order to address any further volume issues, the SRA is working to add a third server to the system by the middle of the week, so that more people can access the site at the same time.

Since registration opened on Thursday, the SRA says that more than 2,700 applications have been logged and nearly 600 approved. The deadline for applications is 14 December.

Commenting on the renewal process so far, a Law Society spokesman said: ‘While we were concerned at the problems experienced by members in the first few hours after the PC renewal system became available, we understand that extra capacity was added on Friday.

‘The system is now working properly, albeit still slower than we would like at times of high volumes. We will continue to feed back, to our SRA colleagues, members’ concerns and comments about their experience of using the site.’