A petition to revoke Article 50 and prevent the UK from leaving the European Union crashed the UK government’s website on Thursday morning, after hundreds of thousands people swarmed to add their signatures.
The petition, which was posted on Wednesday night after PM Theresa May addressed the British public to criticize MPs for her requesting a delay to Brexit, was receiving 1,500 signatures every minute and had been signed by more than 600,000 before the site crashed.
As of midnight London time, the petition has attracted over 2 million signatures.
At around 9am a message appeared to state that the site was “down for maintenance” and asked users to “please try again later.” By 9.40am the site was up and running before crashing shortly afterwards.
The collapsing of the petition site was met with good humour on social media with satirical Twitter account Have I Got News for You, joking: “BREAKING: Theresa May finally succeeds in getting people to back something.”
Others urged people not to camp on the site to see the numbers go up, in order to prevent it from crashing multiple times.
The petition calls on the government to revoke Article 50 and keep the UK in the EU, continuing: “The government repeatedly claims exiting the EU is the will of the people. We need to put a stop to this claim by proving the strength of public support now for remaining in the EU. A people’s vote may not happen, so vote now.”
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