Loadbalancer.org founder Malcolm Turnbull believes the ‘Register to vote’ website crash could have been avoided if one of his loadbalancing products were in operation. Picture by Deep South Media head of visual Paul Collins.
The importance of investing in your company or organisation’s IT infrastructure has been underlined by the high-profile crash of a British government website.
Unprecedented demand to register to vote in the EU referendum, being held in the UK on June 23rd, resulted in frustration for tens of thousands of people as they tried in vain to apply online before the midnight deadline on June 7th.
While the deadline was set by Parliament in legislation, it has now been extended to midnight on Thursday (June 9th) after a furious backlash by MPs.
Portsmouth-based tech firm Loadbalancer.org specialises in producing hardware and software to manage bursts of online traffic efficiently and founder Malcolm Turnbull believes the website crash was preventable.
“The sheer volume of people likely to visit the government’s ‘Register to vote’ website, in the run-up to the well-publicised deadline, could have been better anticipated, with the necessary IT infrastructure in place well beforehand.
“Loadbalancer.org helps solve identical problems for a range of high-street companies whose sites encounter much larger volumes of traffic than the ones that caused the government’s website to fail.
“Our software achieves this by automatically adding more web servers to handle peaks in demand, ensuring online customers can proceed without lagging or interruption.
“We also supply over 45 local authorities with our loadbalancing technology so we know the challenges the ‘Register to vote’ site faced and we are sure that this situation could have been avoided.”
Ahead of the 23:59 cut-off, live usage statistics indicated over 30,000 people were trying to access the ‘Register to vote’ site at around 11pm on Tuesday night.
Additional customers of Loadbalancer.org include O2, BT, BBC, Premier Inn, Mercedes Benz, ASOS, Vodafone, Estee Lauder, Bacardi, River Island, the NHS and Selfridges & Co.
