LDS Part 1 May 2023: An apology

We experienced extremely high levels of traffic yesterday from LDS part 1 candidates attempting to secure a limited number of exam places. The sheer volume of traffic rapidly overloaded our website, which became either slow or inoperable over the course of the afternoon. Candidates were only able to make bookings when interest returned to manageable levels. LDS part 1 remains an exam for which demand for places exceeds supply, and the exam is now full.

We apologise for the frustration that so many of you experienced yesterday. Since last year, we have strengthened our website and its underlying infrastructure against these types of events, but our improvements were unable to keep pace with the number of simultaneous candidates. 

Likewise, we are incredibly sorry we could not do more to communicate with you via social media or other announcements, as we realise this contributed to the frustration for candidates; our communications caused further spikes of interest and exacerbated the problem. Regarding next steps, we're working hard to determine what more we can do alongside already planned major technical works to change booking processes for next year. 

- The RCS Digital team