If you've been on the internet in the last few hours, you've almost certainly seen someone share a link to this.
And you may...have not have been able to access it.
You may then have gone on Twitter and seen people suggesting it might be Russia's fault...
...Or Vladimir Putin's fault...
...or Russia, and North Korea, and Donald Trump's fault...
...And if you're very lucky, you might even have seen a poem or two on the subject.
Including from people who should know better.
Or maybe not.
Anyway, it's not due to any of those things. Here's the official petitions Twitter account to explain.
That's right. The official explanation is somehow more terrifying than the conspiracy.
Anyway, the correct response to the petition website crashing is not “dark forces” but “we are about to enter a completely new and extremely challenging situation with a government that can’t design a website that doesn’t crash”.
Could it be worse? Maybe.
Didn’t know Chris Grayling was in charge of petitions.
You may also have seen a lot of tweets about "foreign actors" involving themselves in the petition.
This is less of a bug and more of a feature, given that literally anyone with an email account can sign one of these petitions. Which rather calls into question the validity of these things, but that's for another day. Anyway, it passed 100,000 signatures long ago and will, therefore, be *considered* for debate.
The 'Revoke Article 50' petition Remainers are all getting excited about is being signed by people everywhere from Russia & Saudi Arabia to Papua New Guinea & North Korea... I thought they were meant to be against foreign interference in our democracy?
But you all need to stop it with this, you're making the web developers mad.
BRITISH TWITTER: OMG the Brexit petition website is down. IT MUST BE A CONSPIRACY WEB DEVELOPER TWITTER: Oh FUCK OFF with your nonsense. This shit is hard.
Everything's just fine.
