HUNDREDS of runners could miss out on a popular Newport road race next year after an online error caused the event to be “oversubscribed”.

For over 30 years the Lliswerry Runners have organised the ‘Lliswerry 8 Road Race’ — an eight mile race that traverses the Goldcliff and Nash villages on the edge of Newport.

While the 2015 event saw a record 700 runners attend, this year many customers who signed up to take part on Sunday, January 29, 2017, will be turned away and refunded.

A statement from the Newport club explains that an online error occurred in the online booking system 'Runners World' which caused the event to accept bookings “over and above what is considered to be a safe maximum”.

The statement said: “This has brought a massive burden of work and stress to the race organising team who have been considering the "least worse" option in the situation.

“Clearly we could simply cancel all entries and restart the whole process, but this would be unfair to the entrants who successfully applied during the early hours of Thursday morning.

“Therefore we have instructed Runners World to return only the last 200 entries and retain all others.”

This action was made possible by increasing the maximum entry from 700 to 850 and a revised list of entrants will be published, the club said.

A Runner’s World statement added there were 'serious issues' with the online registration system and that the system became “quickly oversubscribed” due to popularity of the event.

As a surge of users accessed the website, the page crashed and developed a ‘503 error’ from overloading.

The statement said: “In the sporadic moments at which the entry page was loaded, a large number of people did manage to get their entries through.

“Unfortunately, due to the technical errors, our site’s entrant limit for the event was bypassed leaving it significantly oversubscribed.

“We extend our apologies to the entrants of the Lliswerry 8 and to the race organisers at Lliswerry Runners, all of whom have been greatly let down by our system.

“We recognise the shortfalls our event registration portal has had and are working on overhauling it to try and avoid anything such as this happening in future”.

Lliswerry Runners added: “We regret this has been necessary but as you will see from the Runners World statement, this matter has been beyond our control.

“As you will also appreciate, there is no reserve list and nobody will be able to enter through the 'back door' by sending us messages & emails. Thanks for your understanding and patience."

Race entrants have been contacted by Runners World and will be refunded.