Colorado election results website goes down after polls close due to heavy traffic

The election results website of the Colorado Secretary of State (United States), where the results of all state and local elections are published, stopped working shortly after polls closed at 19:00 on Tuesday 3 November, Denver station KDVR reported.

According to the office's vendor, SOE Software, the cause was "unusually high" traffic: many other websites were scraping the data to publish it on third-party pages, which temporarily brought the page down and also affected other sites. The vendor said it was not a software vulnerability, according to the same station. At around 19:45 a captcha appeared to check that visitors are human, which will remain in place while performance is monitored.

Secretary of State spokesperson Jack Todd denied there had been a cyberattack when asked directly and said the failure only affected public online access to results: "There is no impact on the receipt of ballots or on the results," he said, according to KDVR.

Story under review: so far only one source could be opened (KDVR, republished by Yahoo News). Still missing are a statement from the Secretary of State's office itself, confirmation from another outlet and how long the page was down, which the published information does not specify.