As votes were counted on Election Day in the United States, the Canadian immigration website crashed due to concerned Americans looking to move north.
If you’re looking to make a move to Canada, you might have trouble accessing the nation’s immigration website. The Canadian immigration page crashed on Tuesday night as the votes started favoring Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Reports of the site crashing started coming in on Election Night as Americans searched for information on how to make the move to Canada.
Americans searching “How to move to Canada” and “How to become a citizen of Canada” skyrocketed during the Election Night coverage, prompting the Government of Canada Immigration and Citizenship website to crash. People who went to the page were met with an error message saying that the site was down. Even after it went back up, the site struggled to keep up with all of the traffic, causing it to load very slowly.
So how did we get to this point when the citizens of the United States caused the Canadian immigration website to crash? It all started as something of a joke. Early on the in the 2016 presidential election the joke was that if Donald Trump won the presidency, there would be a mass exodus to the country that shares the northern border of the United States. As the election moved on through the primaries and Trump continued to knock out the competition, the jokes lost their humor as people actually started weighing their options. Now, with Donald Trump leading in the popular vote, there are many people across the nation looking to find out how to make the move to Canada.
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Canada is very friendly to immigrants, granting citizenship through a dedicated process that favors people who move to their country for work or to be with family. Perhaps Canada will add an “American” option to their page in the next few hours.