U.S. visitors flooded immigration website prior to election night crash, department confirms

It seemsDonald Trumpreally did send them running to Canada. Or at least got them thinking about it.

As the businessman and former reality TV staremerged as the winner of the American presidential campaign Tuesday night, 100,000 people in the Unites States visited Canada's immigration website, contributing to a crash.

The following day, thousands gathered across the U.S. to protest the president-elect, whose divisive campaign took aim at immigrants, Muslims and women who accusedhim of sexual assault.

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Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada confirmed that visitors from the U.S. made up half the traffic on its website when it "started to experience difficulties" around 11 p.m. on Nov. 8. The usual proportion of visitors from the U.S. ranges from 8.8 to 11.6 per cent.

In total, 200,000 users were on the website when it crashed, compared to 17,000 users at the same time the previous week.

At the time of the crash, 37 per cent of visitors were in Canada, three per cent in Australia and one per cent in the United Kingdom.

Those who tried to visit the website after it crashedand received a server error messagewere not counted in the total.

The spike in visitors combined with technical difficulties led to the crash, the department said.

The website was back up and running around 8:30 a.m. on Nov. 9.