The High Court of Australia’s judgments website went offline for an hour this afternoon, just before the court handed down its ruling that Australia’s same-sex marriage postal survey was to go ahead. Another piece of national technology infrastructure that isn’t up to the task of handling the vote, then.
It’s loading for most users now, but slowly. It’s almost certain that the website outage was due to much more traffic than usual, from expectant parties sitting there and refreshing away waiting for the ruling to be handed down.
https://twitter.com/BevanShields/status/905645014075588612
The marriage equality postal survey is on. High Court dismisses both challenges to its legality. And the High Court website has crashed.
— marquelawyers (@marquelawyers) September 7, 2017
Of course, the High Court website doesn’t update instantly with rulings and judgments anyway, so the (likely) excess of traffic to it was probably all to no end anyway. If you want to find the ruling, it’s here. [High Court of Australia]
The high court website doesn’t have live streaming of results. The fact it is down is, unfortunate, but largely inconsequential.
— Paul Karp (@Paul_Karp) September 7, 2017