Canada's Immigration Site Crashed Because Tons of Americans Want to Move There

Jason Hoffman/Thrillist
Jason Hoffman/Thrillist

Now that Donald Trump is officially the President-elect of the United States, it's more than safe to say that many Americans are waking up Wednesday with a sudden strong desire to flee the United States for a new life abroad. But if you're hoping to call Canada home in the near future, well, good luck getting on the country's Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship website first.

As of Wednesday morning, Canada's official website for information about immigration and citizenship appeared to either load very slowly or return an error message for some users, according to a report by CNN. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the website's intermittent crashing first started late on Tuesday night as presidential election returns increasingly suggested a Trump presidency. 

"The Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship website became temporarily inaccessible to users as a result of a significant increase in the volume of traffic," a spokesperson for the agency told BBC News. "Shared Services Canada worked through the night and continues to work to resolve the issue to ensure that the website is available for users as soon as possible."

Sure, it's not 100% clear the election results directly caused the website's outages and lingering issues, but considering how many times you've heard people threaten to join our neighbors to the North throughout the bruising 2016 campaign and ones that came before it, this should really come as no surprise. But along with merely accessing the immigration website for information, it's also worth noting that someday enjoying all that delicious poutine and the nation's liberal-leaning government might be a bit more challenging than you'd expect. 

It remains to be seen whether the election actually triggers a mass-exodus to Canada, but hell, maybe you'll be able to watch the Trump presidency unfold from a liberal colony of American ex-pats. You'll just have to live with the fact that you're a damn quitter, of course. 

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