LUCKNOW, April 5 -- Lucknow Development Authority's (LDA's) official web portal crashed on Friday within hours of the launch of its Anant Nagar scheme on Mohaan Road in the state capital, leaving thousands unable to complete the registration or make payments.

Despite the portal going live at 12 pm, soon after chief minister Yogi Adityanath launched the scheme, only 175 people managed to pay the Rs.1,100 booklet fee and download it by the evening, said additional secretary Gyanendra Verma.

Thousands of users faced issues such as the website failing to load, payment gateway errors, and OTP validation failures. High traffic was suspected to be the reason for the crash.

"By 2 pm, about 400 users were able to reach the payment gateway, but,...