The government has apologised after Matt Hancock’s attempt to test essential workers for coronavirus ran into problems within hours of its launch. The health secretary had promised that from 6am on Friday morning up to 10 million essential workers and their families would be able to apply for a drive-in test or home-testing kit. But within three hours of the site launching, anyone accessing the self-referral test site was told that applications had closed. A message said: “You can’t currently register for a Covid-19 test. Please check back here later.” The Department for Health and Social Care blamed the problems on “significant demand”. In a tweet it apologised for the inconvenience and promised more tests would be available on Saturday. The Labour MP Toby Perkins, the shadow minister for apprenticeships, was among many who received the message about closed applications. And those who did get through earlier were told that Friday’s allocation of home test kits had already been issued. The problems took the gloss off Hancock’s launch of the self-referral system, which he said was “critical” to ramping up testing. Speaking on BBC Radio’s Today programme before the problems emerged he said: “If you have symptoms or somebody else in your household has symptoms, then you can go online to Gov.uk and self-refer for a test – that’s a new system up and running this morning.” He said until now there had not been enough people coming forward for tests despite the increase in capacity. He said: “It’s a good problem to have, because it means that we can then expand the amount of those who are eligible and critically we’ve been able to bring in this new online booking system that opened, six o’clock this morning, so that if you’re an essential worker, you can just book yourself instead of going through what was a quite a complicated route through your employer.” He added: “It was always part of the plan to bring in this new booking system. We only finished writing the code yesterday. So it’s been an unbelievable effort by the technical people to build this new system … The reason that the increase was pretty slow at the start of the month was because we’ve been building these systems to automate the testing, automate the labs and the IT systems that are needed. So we’re ahead of the plan, but you know, many a slip between cup and lip.” Asked whether he thought the government would meet the target of 100,000 tests a day by next Thursday, Hancock said: “I do, yes, but nothing’s guaranteed in life.”