So many people visited fact-checking website PolitiFact during the State of the Union, it crashed

(Image credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The people were doing their homework during President Trump's State of the Union address — so many that they crashed fact-checking website PolitiFact halfway through the speech.

PolitiFact is a nonpartisan website run by reporters from the Tampa Bay Times, and going into the State of the Union, they fact-checked Trump 498 times, finding that only 4 percent of those statements were "true," 33 percent were "false," and 15 percent were "pants on fire." When its servers crashed about 40 minutes into the State of the Union, PolitiFact kept going, just on Twitter. The site was only down about six minutes, and made it through the rest of the speech unscathed.

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.