Manx Telecom is apologising after its official timing website for Saturday’s Parish Walk crashed throughout much of the 24 hour event.

The company says unprecedented demand was to blame with nearly three times more people than last year logging on.

The problem meant timings for competitors around the 85 mile course were unavailable for most of the event.

There were 36,676 hits on the parishwalk.com website on Saturday, almost three times the figure for the 2011 event when there were 12,553 hits, which led to technical problems with the SPORTident site.

David Smith, marketing director for Manx Telecom, said: ‘We have sponsored the SPORTident timing system for the Parish Walk since 2007 and it has proved very popular for anyone wanting to track the progress of friends and family taking part.

‘Unfortunately, due to a significant increase in website traffic this year SPORTident experienced technical problems which prevented times from being updated. The system was still able to collate accurate times for each walker and send updates via our text messaging system, but the technical issue at SPORTident prevented this information from being uploaded to the website.

‘As title sponsor of the Manx Telecom Parish Walk we can only apologise to everyone who was relying on the SPORTident website to track the progress of walkers. We appreciate the inconvenience and annoyance caused by this problem and shall conduct a full review to prevent it occurring again.

‘However, the number of hits on the timing website underlines the increasing popularity of the event and overall we were delighted with our first year of sponsorship.

‘The Manx Telecom Parish Walk continues to grow in popularity and we thank everyone who took part in what is a fantastic sporting and community occasion.’

Manx Telecom reports the live GPS tracking system carried by some of the leading walkers worked well and, for the first time in the event’s long history, fans were able to follow their progress every step of the way online via www.mt.im/tracking with the new system seeing over 40,000 page impressions over the duration of the race.