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United Kingdom EU Government The Internet

Online Petition Site Crashed By Millions of 'Cancel Brexit' Signers (time.com) 478

"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."
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Online Petition Site Crashed By Millions of 'Cancel Brexit' Signers

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  • Open to abuse (Score:2, Interesting)

    by foobar666 ( 1191883 )
    Signatures to the petition aren't verified as being British citizens and it doesn't prevent multiple voting. This has been demonstrated by newspapers. Analysis has already shown a large number of signatures from outside the UK, including North Korea and Russia.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You know that UK citizens can live abroad, right? And somebody taught you to write deceptively ambiguous phrases.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      And the million marching in London, are they bots too?

      The petition site uses email verification, so it not trivial to create a large number of fake signatures. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47668946

      • by rworne ( 538610 )

        Not too hard?

        nobrexit+1@gmail.com
        nobrexit+2@gmail.com
        ...
        nobrexit+1000000@gmail.com

        Not too hard. Only need one valid email address.

      • And the million marching in London, are they bots too?

        As one of the marchers, I can say with complete confidence, "Yes, I am a bot!"

        At least it is more believable than anything the ERG have ever said (apart from Boris's "we are going to make a Titanic success of this!" - that was definitely true).

    • ...Analysis has already shown a large number of signatures from outside the UK, including North Korea and Russia.

      Last time I checked there were shown to be 25 from Russia... The petition site is far from infallible but this is one of the most signed petitions since the sites inception, and clearly the one with the highest signing rate - Aren't you missing the point.

    • Re:Open to abuse (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 23, 2019 @11:24AM (#58320674)

      The petition can be signed by UK passport holders - anywhere in the world.
      I've a British passport, live in Canada, and have signed it.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      My daughter signed it from Herzegovina and I signed it from Iceland. We are both English, just out of the country at the moment.

    • Re: Open to abuse (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 23, 2019 @11:37AM (#58320752)

      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.

    • Re:Open to abuse (Score:5, Informative)

      by markus ( 2264 ) on Saturday March 23, 2019 @11:40AM (#58320762) Homepage
      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... [google.com]
      • Not only that but the concentration of votes very closely matches the high concentrations of remain voters in the original referendum.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Also note that the claims that votes came from North Korea are dubious as they are based on geo-location of an IP address. IP addresses change hands from time to time and such databases are known to be unreliable, especially in places like North Korea where their internet peering is via China.

  • like its 2001....

  • by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Saturday March 23, 2019 @11:15AM (#58320630) Homepage
    More than 4 million sign Brexit petition to revoke article 50. [theguardian.com]

    See the Petition [parliament.uk]. 4,392,160 signatures at Saturday, March 23, 2019, 09:11 am Pacific Time.
  • In two years they went from "easiest trade deal, we hold all the cards, germany has to sell us cars, have our cake and eat it" to "we always knew our economy would crash and we would lose jobs, we never promised a deal, we will survive just like the blitz".
    Fucking idiots and grifters all of them.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Ashthon ( 5513156 )

      In two years they went from "easiest trade deal, we hold all the cards, germany has to sell us cars, have our cake and eat it" to "we always knew our economy would crash and we would lose jobs, we never promised a deal, we will survive just like the blitz". Fucking idiots and grifters all of them.

      It could easily have been easiest trade deal in history, since the deal we wanted was on offer. EU Council President Donald Tusk made clear in a Tweet that a Canada style deal had been on offer from the start, which is exactly what we voted for:

      https://twitter.com/eucopresident/status/1047825916905357312 [twitter.com]

      So, the deal we wanted was on offe, and we were already in regulatory alignment with the EU, so this should have been a simple proccess. The problem isn't the Brexiteers, but the bitter remainers, who

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        So who's the problem here, the Brexiteers, who simply expect the result of the referendum to be implemented, or the remainers who are attempting to subvert democracy simply because they didn't like the result?

        The Brexiters.

        Because they have the same delusion that you hare that a completely undefined result is "simple" to implement.

        Notably, there's Speaker of the House John Bercow, who has a "Bollocks to Brexit" sticker on his car.

        So you do then believe that wives are chattels of their husbands.

    • And enough people listened to that dribble or failed to turn up on the referendum. Be careful what you ask for, you might get it.
  • by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Saturday March 23, 2019 @01:05PM (#58321224) Journal

    ...most of those fervent "down-voters" couldn't be arsed to get out of their chairs and actually vote back when IT COUNTED.

    Sadly, in real life you don't get a "do over" just because you weren't paying attention the first time, or because you're on the (to you and ALL YOUR FRIENDS) "right" side.

    I'm guessing, of course, but if the groundswell so "universally" portrayed today had actually voted, Brexit would have gone down without question.

  • for this mess.
    Seriously, they thought they could leave the EU, keep the current state (no border) between the republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, and remain out of the EU customs union and single market. I am quite surprised 52% of the voters bought that BS.

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