Canada welcomes immigrants and makes much of the initial process online through its website. In general, immigrants must have either a post-secondary education, a job offer in the country, close relatives, a business with high net worth or significant financial resources.
On the U.S. President Election night, the Canadian immigration website went down. Later, Canada said that the cause was because U.S. citizens were accessing the website in an unexpected surge of traffic.
According to the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, traffic to the website went up to 200,000 simultaneous visits at one point. This was more than 1000 percent increase over the same day a week before.
The usual proportion of U.S. web visitors accessing the site ranges from 8.8 to 11.6 percent. This time, over 100,000 of the website's visitors, or 50 percent, came from the U.S., 37 percent from Canada, 3 percent from Australia and 1 percent from the United Kingdom.
It "started to experience difficulties" around 11 p.m. on November 8th.
The crash was somehow predicted. After Donald Trump won on Super Tuesday in March 2016, Google searches for "move to Canada" skyrocketed to a rate that surpassed even at the Election Night.
During the crash, visitors of the website received a server error message. The website went back online on November 9th at around 8.30 a.m..
