Thousands of students received an email wrongly telling them their graduation had been cancelled.

Final-year undergraduates at Edinburgh University were sent an email telling them they had not received an award for their degree and would therefore not take part in the summer graduation ceremony.

The institution has blamed a "system error" for the message being sent to the students in error on Thursday.

A new email has been circulated informing students the ceremonies have not been cancelled.

The email was titled "Graduation Ceremony Cancelled - No Award" and told students they would not be graduating until later in the year.

The university has more than 24,000 undergraduates, with degree programmes typically lasting four years.

A spokeswoman for the university said: "Our preliminary investigation suggest that these emails were regrettably issued as a result of a system error.

"There was no breach of our systems and no student data was compromised.

"The university has written to all students affected to reassure them that their graduations have not been cancelled and asking them to ignore the emails."