Parliament's justice select committee has unanimously agreed to reopen submissions on the Treaty Principles Bill after submitters experienced technical issues.
People expressed frustration and outrage this week after persistent issues stopped them from giving online feedback before the 11.59pm Tuesday deadline.
The deadline has now been extended to 1pm on Tuesday, January 14.
Initial indications are that the committee received 300,000 online submissions, half of which were received on the last day.
It easily surpasses the previous record of about 107,000 on the Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Bill in 2021.
The final number of submissions is likely to change as committee staff work through processing them.
Submissions emailed to treatyprinciples@parliament.govt.nz or justice@parliament.govt.nz between Monday and 9am Thursday will be accepted as a regular submission, provided their email references the technical issues with the website, contains a name, a submission, and meets the submission conditions.
Those who emailed submissions that do not meet this criteria would need to redo it on the website portal.
The committee has "strongly encouraged" those wishing to make submissions to do so promptly and not leave doing so until the final hours of next Tuesday.
Those experiencing technical difficulties - or wondering if their email meets the committee's criteria - have been asked to email committee staff at treatyprinciples@parliament.govt.nz.
Anyone approaching the committee about technical difficulties needs to attach a screenshot of the issue they're experiencing.
The Justice Committee says people may experience a delay getting a response to their queries due to the high level of public engagement.
"Committee staff are working hard to support everyone to participate in the committee's work, and the committee appreciates your patience," it said.
Each individual submitter will be counted once, even if they make multiple submissions, and it's up to the committee as to how it handles identical submissions from different individuals.
Problems with the website meant people were not able to make a submission by the original deadline of 11.59pm on Tuesday, 7 January.
RNZ was contacted by dozens of people who couldn't get their submission in and one case where the feedback was altered.
The committee met on Thursday to decide whether an extension was merited.
Tech consultant Louisa Taylor said the errors she observed on the website could be caused by low server capacity or an attack.
"If a nefarious actor sent a lot of traffic to the site they could actually take it down," she said.
It's not clear how many people were affected by technical problems but RNZ has seen evidence they could date back to late November 2024.
Back then, a submitter emailed their feedback to Parliament, flagging they had experienced problems with the official submissions portal.
