The Scottish Parliament have today provided an explanation to The Firm for the crash in the public petitions website which lasted in excess of 5 days, blocking the public from signing live petitions and forcing an extension to be applied to make up for the service break.

"The problem with the online petitions system occured during the process to bring the site in house," The Firm was told.

"The system to date has been hosted by our external contractor BT whose contract ended on 31 October. Work to date has involved transferring all the data held on BT's server to one of the Parliament's servers and putting in place all the necessary IT arrangements for 'traffic' to be rerouted.

"A problem arose at BT's end while this process was underway which meant members of the public couldn't properly access the site during the changeover period. BT resolved the issue - we don't have details of what actions they took - they reinstated access to the site and the change over process carried on along with completion of the data transfer."

The Firm's request for an explanation was submitted on 25 October.