MUMBAI, May 22 -- Chaos and confusion marked the first day of the FYJC admission preference-filling process on Thursday after the admission website crashed due to heavy traffic from students across the state. Thousands of students and parents were forced to wait for several hours after this, leading the school education department to extend the deadline for filling Part 2 of the application form till May 23. The problem began on Thursday morning when students started filling in their college preferences for the first round of admissions for Class 11. Within a short time, the website slowed down and later stopped functioning completely. Many users saw a message stating 'Application Under Maintenance' on their screens. Parents and students who had planned to complete the process early in the day were left stranded for hours. Several students had visited nearby guidance centres and junior colleges to seek help in filling out the forms, but they too faced long delays because of the malfunctioning website. Although the portal resumed operations after 3 pm, users said it continued to work very slowly. The centralised online admission process for FYJC admissions for 2026-27 is being conducted statewide by the directorate of secondary and higher secondary education. The process began on April 10. This year, students were allowed to fill Part 1 of the form even before the declaration of the SSC results. However, most registrations increased only after these were announced. "The website crash created huge stress among students and parents. Initially, it was working properly, but as more students logged in, it became very slow until it finally stopped," said Anahita Mohit, a parent from Parel. Another parent, Narendra Dabhade from Mulund, said they faced repeated technical errors while selecting colleges. "We started filling the preference form for our child, but the same college names kept appearing on multiple pages. Whenever we selected one college and tried to select another, an error message appeared and we had to keep repeating the process," he said. The technical issues affected students across the state. Along with the filling of college preferences, other activities such as fresh registrations and submission of Part 2 forms also came to a halt. Since students were originally given only two days, May 21 and 22, to complete the process, many parents worried that they would not be able to finish the procedure in time. Accepting the problem, Mahesh Palkar, director of secondary and higher secondary education, said the website briefly crashed because hundreds of thousands of students tried to access it at the same time. "Technicians immediately worked on the issue and restored the website by afternoon," he said. "Since then, no major complaints have been received. We have still decided to give students one extra day to complete the process."...