Were you one of many potential domain owners trying to hurry the submission of your gTLD application to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers by today’s deadline? Thanks to reports of “unusual behavior with the operation of the system” at ICANN, you aspiring web domain owners have been granted one more week to finalize your applications, according to the organization.

In a statement that was released today, ICANN recognized that a technical issue may have been interfering with the TLD Application System and therefore, in order to protect all applicants, the deadline to complete the application has been extended until 23:59 UTC on Friday, April 20, 2012. The statement continued, “ICANN is taking the most conservative approach possible to protect all applicants and allow adequate time to resolve the issue. Therefore, TAS will be shut down until Tuesday at 23:59 UTC – unless otherwise notified before that time.”

Note, for you readers in the United States, 23:59 UTC means 19:59 EST, or 7:59PM.

According to an ICANN spokesperson who spoke with Domain Incite, the technical issue was not the result of a cyberattack. “No application data has been lost from those who have already submitted the applications, so it should not pose problems for existing applicants,” ICANN said.

ICANN has not yet commented on whether this deadline push-back will affect the date for when the organization will release a full list of gTLD applicants. The scheduled date for the list’s release is slated for the end of this month, April 30.

As of March 25, ICANN said that there had been 839 registered users.

If homework due dates ever taught me anything, just because you’ve gotten a deadline reprieve doesn’t mean you should wait until the absolute last second to get those applications finished. But tonight, at least, sleep a little easier.

[Via The Telegraph.]