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SALT LAKE CITY -- Election Day is off to a rough start for the lieutenant governor's office. Heavy usage crashed the state's voter information website Monday night, which prevented voters from looking up their voting location.
The state's voter information website, vote.utah.gov, had so many hits on its server Monday night, the site just couldn't handle the traffic.
The lieutenant governor's office says the server received 200,000 hits per second, causing the site to first crash around 8 p.m. That's not 200,000 people, but perhaps just frustrated users clicking multiple times on site.
The lieutenant governor's office says right away IT personnel were trying to fix the problem and, at one point, they had it back up and working, but then it crashed again early Tuesday morning.
State elections director Mark Thomas said, "In the past we have had a lot of people on our website. We know this is the one day out of the year that we will get a lot, but the good thing to know is that it is up now, we are watching it, we are monitoring it, we have put some extra hardware behind it; and I think we are in good shape."
We anticipated having a huge number of users, but this was just higher than we ever could have imagined.
–Mark Thomas
Thomas said they looked at the possibility the site was hacked, but it doesn't appear that that's what happened.
The traffic on the state's election website may be a reflection of what we're seeing at the polls today. At several locations in the Salt Lake Valley we found voters lined up, waiting in some cases 20 to 30 minutes to cast their ballot.
Another option for finding a polling location is here at KSL.COM. CLICK HERE for the banner on the top of the home page.
You also can call the Lieutenant Governor's Office for polling location information. The number is 801-538-1041.
E-mail: spark@ksl.com
