Donald Trump wins and Canadian immigration website crashes

Canada's main immigration website appeared to crash and suffer repeated outages over the course of election night in the US.

Users in the United States, Canada and Asia reported an internal server error message when trying to access Citizenship and Immigration Canada online.

Twitter users were quick to pick up on the outage, claiming it was caused by the high number of Americans visiting the page as it became more likely that Donald Trump was going to win.

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While "there's no guarantee the two things are related", says CNN, "given the loud insistence of many Americans, every election cycle, to move north in the event of an unfavorable election outcome, it's not a huge leap to assume that many despondent voters are exploring options".

Data from Google Trends also suggested searches for "move to Canada" spiked significantly during the night as Trump victories unfolded in key battle states such as Florida and Ohio, reports The Guardian.

The trends seemed to mimic events following the UK's EU referendum, when multiple searches were made by people in the UK looking to gain Irish citizenship following the country's vote to leave.

While there has been no official word on the outage from the Canadian government, its global affairs department posted a tweet just as it became clear that Trump was about to win: