Americans Are Literally Crashing Canada's Immigration Website

Americans are terrified, and they’re desperate to figure out how they can emigrate to Canada if — and it’s still if — Donald Trump wins the Presidential Election. Trump-fearing voters are so interested in Canada, in fact, that they’re accidentally overloading the Canadian Immigration website with traffic and making it crash.

For an intermittent period on Tuesday night, after Donald Trump surged to an intimidating lead over Hillary Clinton in the race for the White House, the Canadian Immigration and Citizenship website crashed or went down entirely as Americans googled the everloving shit out of it. Essentially, the American electorate (or the portions of it that didn’t vote for Donald Trump at all), accidentally carried out a Distributed Denial of Service attack on their allies to the north.

DDoS attacks like the one that took down Spotify, Twitter, and Reddit last month are pretty simple. A huge number of computers, like a botnet of smart-devices, all request access from a certain website or server at the same time. The server gets overloaded and shuts down. With the Canadian website, it looks like this:

Or this:

Except in this case, it’s not a botnet or a hacker; it’s thousands of concerned Americans trying to figure out a way to move out of a country that appears to be awarding its highest elected office to a candidate that has openly promised to persecute millions of his own citizens.

For what it’s worth, it’s actually pretty difficult to legally move to Canada, unless you’re a student or have an extremely good job offer from a Canadian company. You could always try to cultivate a cross-border romance and marry into Canadian citizenship, but that’s a long shot too. At the end of this very long day, we’re all still American citizens, and leaving the country means you can never get it back.