From
The Register
The shiny new police crime-mapping system popped up yesterday – and promptly fell back down again.
This is the long-awaited interactive mapping system, launched this week, and designed to allow individuals to compare crime figures across England and Wales.
In practice, widescale public interest in the site has been its undoing. One Reg reader sent us a screen grab yesterday showing a part of a map, accompanied by a series of "cannot connect to mysql" warning messages.
Even this was probably a better result than they would have obtained this morning, when repeated attempts to connect to the site all resulted in a screen message stating that "the connection has timed out".
According to the Home Office, this is no more than teething problems caused by high levels of initial interest. A Home Office spokesperson said: "The high level of public interest in the new national Crime Map has put temporary pressure on the website. Urgent work is underway to resolve this and the website should be fully working again shortly....