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."