"I would like to sincerely apologize to all young people, parents and teachers who were inconvenienced by the exam environment's failure," Kallas said at the government press conference Thursday.

"Knowing how long young people prepare for these exams, how much anxiety they entail, it is extremely regrettable something like this happened because of mistakes on the state level," she added.

Kallas said that the Ministry of Education is working on fixing the problems and avoiding such incidents in the future.

"On behalf of the Estonian state, I sincerely apologize," the prime minister said.

Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna also referred to the exam system freezing as extremely regrettable. "The Ministry of Education is responsible for this thing, and the minister is not denying it. I truly apologize as chairman of Eesti 200 to the 3,800 young people who did their work. This time, the adults didn't do theirs," Tsahkna remarked.

He added that the Ministry of Education and Research has initiated an internal audit, the examinations information system team will be replaced and recent developments sources externally.

Tallinn and Harju County state high schools held their entry exams last Saturday to which 3,840 candidates had registered, but the electronic testing had to be canceled because the EIS system failed. The results of the disrupted test will not count toward admissions and schools will decide which procedures to use independently.

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