A popular political fact-checking website crashed during President Donald Trump‘s State of the Union address on Tuesday night.
PolitiFact‘s website crashed for approximately five minutes during Trump’s speech when they were fact-checking statements made by Trump.
“Welp … our website just crashed,” they wrote on Twitter. “Thanks for reading ?!!? We’ll keep things up here on Twitter while we see what happened.”
Welp … our website just crashed.
— PolitiFact (@PolitiFact) January 31, 2018
Thanks for reading ?!!? We’ll keep things up here on Twitter while we see what happened.
Five minutes later the account said they were back up.
But within those few minutes, there were plenty of jokes and theories as to why the website crashed—including, of course, the sheer number of statements the group was fact checking.
“No computer on earth could keep up with that volume of lies,” one Twitter user wrote.
“You can only fact check Trump so many times in a day, & he’s talking a lot tonight lol,” another wrote.
But the jokes didn’t stop there.
Trump literally lies SO much that he broke https://t.co/k1kFWJMp8q —> https://t.co/6k46HFlXA4
— Jesse Ferguson (@JesseFFerguson) January 31, 2018
“The fact-check machine broke” is all you need to know about Tump’s first #SOTU. You can all go home now. https://t.co/RqybD3Iobi
— Danielle Campoamor (@DCampoamor) January 31, 2018
Their servers clearly need an upgrade for this administration. https://t.co/YLgYArAZsP
— Ms. James (@JamestownUS) January 31, 2018
When all was said and done, PolitiFact said Trump made two false statements, three mostly false statements, and one half true statements during the State of the Union.
Late last year the group named the president’s instance that Russia‘s interference in the 2016 election was “made up” and a “hoax” as its annual “Lie of the Year.”
You can read more about PolitiFact’s State of the Union fact-checking here.
