British Government Petition Site Crashes As People Demand Brexit Cancelation

Close-up photo of the Palace of Westminster (known as Houses of Parliament) located in the City of Westminster, London.


Update: Two things happened since this story was published. The first was that a developer Tweeted to explain the problem. In short it was overwhelmed by volume, not specifically down people signing, but the speed at which people were so doing. This put a load on the database which it could not cope with.

Here's a screenshot of that Tweet:

An explanation of why the site was down


A Commons Spokesperson also replied to my request with the following:

“We know that the Petitions site is experiencing problems due to the number of people using the site. This is a mixture of people signing petitions and refreshing the site to see changes to the number of signatures. We are working to get the problems fixed as soon as possible.”

At the last available count a petition to revoke Article 50 hosted on the UK Parliament site had reached 696,000. The last 500,000 or so of those signatures were added in the few hours since Prime Minister Theresa May made her asinine speech last night.

Revoking Article 50 would entirely cancel the Brexit process and the UK would continue to be a member of the EU, under the same deal it currently has. The deadline for a revocation is 11pm GMT on the 29th of March 2019. After that date the UK would need to reapply for EU membership. If A50 was revoked the government could issue it again at a later date if it so chose.

So why has the site gone down when it's held up okay before? Well, there's a number of possible explanations, none much better than the rest.

  • The site may have experienced heavy loads due to people trying to sign and crashed.
  • A DDoS attack might be attempting to prevent people signing the petition
  • The government is embarrassed and have ordered it to be taken down

The last option is quite unlikely as the service isn't run directly by the government. Even if they thought it was worth removing it they'd have to involve people who don't work for the government, namely the Civil Service.

The first is, of course, possible. However the site has managed large petitions in the past and not seen such obvious downtime.

However the second possibility, that of a DDoS attack is entirely likely. Only the parliamentary network team will have any clear idea about this but the petitions website is hosted separately from the main site, which has remained online during this situation.

So who would work so hard to bring down a site during such a popular vote? Well, the usual suspects presumably. It could be one of the well-funded campaigns for the UK to leave the EU or it could be a foreign power attempting to cause further disruption to democracy.

Those do sound like the musings of a person with paranoia, but we have so many unanswered questions about the funding used to secure a win for the Brexit vote. Facebook campaigns are run with tens of thousands of pounds that seem to come from nowhere.

Occam's razor, or the simplest explanation, would simply be that the traffic was too much for the servers to handle and that's the reason the site is down. Unless there's evidence of foul play, that's the most responsible assumption to make.

I've asked the Parliamentary press office for a comment on this story, but one had not arrived by the time I published this story. As always I will update if one appears in the near future.

The UK government promises to have a debate on any petition that hits 100,000 signatures and will respond to anything attracting more than 10,000 names. Famously UK citizens signed up in their droves to prevent a state visit by President Trump - a petition that gathered more than 1.6 million signatures.

Of course petitions very rarely achieve much of anything at all, but they do offer a way for people to add their names to a chorus of voices that want common sense to prevail over a process that has so far lacked any kind of sense at all.

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