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Online Petition Site Crashed By Millions of 'Cancel Brexit' Signers (time.com)
"More than 3 million people have signed a petition to cancel Brexit on the U.K. government's official petitions website -- so many that the website crashed multiple times," reports Time:
The petition had received some 600,000 signatures at a rate of 1,500 every 60 seconds before the site crashed at about 9 a.m. U.K. time on Thursday, the Guardian reported. By mid afternoon, the site was back online but suffering intermittent outages. There were 2 million signatures by Thursday evening and 3 million by midday Friday...
The U.K. government must now allow a debate on the petition's contents in parliament.
The Guardian notes that the CTO of company that built the petition site had bragged in a tweet Wednesday that the 1,000 signatures per minute was "Not too bad, but nowhere near crashing the site --you all need to try harder tomorrow."
By the next morning he had tweeted âoeWell done everyone -- the site crashed because calculating the trending count became too much of a load on the database."
The U.K. government must now allow a debate on the petition's contents in parliament.
The Guardian notes that the CTO of company that built the petition site had bragged in a tweet Wednesday that the 1,000 signatures per minute was "Not too bad, but nowhere near crashing the site --you all need to try harder tomorrow."
By the next morning he had tweeted âoeWell done everyone -- the site crashed because calculating the trending count became too much of a load on the database."
More than 4 million sign Brexit petition to revoke article 50.
See the Petition. 4,392,160 signatures at Saturday, March 23, 2019, 09:11 am Pacific Time.
British citizens outside the UK are entitled to sign. And that "large number" was about 3%, last I heard. Which is well in proportion to the number of expat Brits.
Stop spreading rumors. You can verify for yourself that more than 95% of the votes come from within the UK: https://docs.google.com/spread...
Typically, online petitions and opinion polls only have a tiny participation rate. Not everybody has readily available internet access, not everybody follow the media, and most importantly, not everybody bothers to get involved, even if it is in their own interest. This means, seeing 4+M signatures equals a much much bigger actual number of voters. And as is, the petition already represents about a quarter of the people who voted to "remain" in the referendum. That's significant. It suggests that there is a groundswell of support for remaining in the EU.
The petition site isn't run by some shady online opinion poll. It's run by the UK parliament. According to a spokeperson, it actively filters submissions to detect bot activity. At the very least, it requires a unique name, verified (!) e-mail address and UK postal address. Some unconfirmed reports also state that it requires a UK passport number (maybe, that only happens for suspect submissions?). The UK parliament trusts that these numbers are substantially accurate.
That's huge. It means anybody saying "the will of the people" is to continue with Brexit is blatantly lying to themselves and to the rest of the world.