Canada's immigration website crashes during U.S. election vote

PanARMENIAN.Net - Canada's immigration website has suffered an intermittent fault that has made it inaccessible to visitors during the U.S. election vote, BBC News reports.

It has led to speculation that the problem is the result of increased traffic from U.S. citizens in the wake of Donald Trump's victory.

Officials from the Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) service could not be reached for comment.

But some experts suggest there are other more likely causes. "It could just be an extraordinary coincidence," commented Prof Alan Woodward from the University of Surrey.

Nevertheless, the glitch has been widely commented about on social media.

The issue is not the only glitch linked to the U.S. elections.

Officials were unable to access Colorado's voter registration database for about half an hour on Tuesday afternoon.

"Clerks can't process mail ballots that need to have the signature verified," tweeted Lynn Bartels, spokeswoman for Colorado's secretary of state, at the time, adding that in-person votes also had to temporarily be treated as being "provisional" while the fault endured.

"Unfortunately our system goes down now and then," she said.

North Carolina's State Board of Elections was also forced to switch from using an electronic voting check-in system to a paper-based one at several of its precincts after experiencing "technical problems".

It later reported a delay in uploading about 93,000 of its voting results before solving the problem.

There were also unverified claims that some machines had switched votes for one candidate for another.

"The machines, you put down a Republican and it registers as a Democrat, and they've had a lot of complaints about that today," Donald Trump told Fox News.

However, officials had blamed earlier reports of such problems on "user error".

Elsewhere, the Verge has reported that a company that had provided a get-out-the-vote telephone and texting service to the Clinton campaign had suffered a cyber-attack causing "brief periods of unavailability".

The news site reported that members of the 4chan chat site had said they had intended to carry out a denial-of-service attack - which involves flooding a target with internet traffic - which might have been responsible.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg has acknowledged "an internal issue" caused its instant messaging tool to stop working for about an hour on Tuesday morning.

The service is used by financial traders and money managers to discuss market-moving events.

The Financial Times reported that users temporarily switched to WhatsApp, but that the fault "frayed nerves" ahead of the election results.