Why did the UGC website go offline for almost 2 hours on March 25?

The University Grants Commission's official website went offline on March 25 afternoon and an error message saying 'service unavailable' was displayed when one attempted to load the site. The website came back online at around 3 pm.

The message 'HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable' was displayed on the UGC website for a few hours from 1 PM on March 25. This particular server error response code indicates that the server is not ready to handle the request. Common causes of such an error either mean a server is down for maintenance or that it is overloaded. This response is typically used for temporary conditions.

This is not the first time this month that the UGC website isn't working properly. Earlier, in the first week of March students had complained on Twitter that the website and its affiliate websites such as the National Testing Agency sites had also been down with a similar error being displayed.

Students were unable to open the website on March 2, which was the last day for filling up UGC NET examination forms. The server had been down since morning and they were also unable to pay for the exam fee, the students had complained then. 

@ugc_india UGC NET website down since last night, the option for fee payment was also disabled until yesterday @DG_NTA please look into this and reactivate the portal

— Ayush Mohan Dixit