Canada’s immigration website crashed due to a high volume of Americans visiting the site when the U.S. election results started to come in, officials have confirmed in a statement to CTV News.
The statement said that at around 11 p.m. ET on Nov. 8, the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) website began experiencing technical difficulties with more than 200,000 users accessing the site. At that time, approximately 50 per cent of the traffic came from American IP addresses according to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.
The statement noted that the statistics didn’t account for anyone who had tried to access the site when it was down.
At the same time last week, the website had just over 17,000 visitors as opposed to the 200,000 on Tuesday evening. The statement said the spike in activity was “significantly higher” than the site’s usual activity and the amount of Americans accessing the site was also much higher.
Typically, the amount of users with American IP addresses ranges from 8.8 per cent to 11.6 per cent. In comparison, Americans amounted for about half of the website’s traffic on the night of the election.
When the website went down on Tuesday evening, many social media users speculated the outage was caused by Americans researching how they could move to Canada in order to escape living under a Donald Trump presidency. An error page with the text “there is a problem with the resource you are looking for, and it cannot be displayed” popped up when users attempted to visit Canada’s immigration site.
The statement said the situation has been resolved and the site is fully operation again.
