Canada’s main immigration website appeared to crash and New Zealand reported increased traffic to its website for residency visas from US nationals in the hours before Donald Trump surged to victory in the US presidential election.
The website appeared to suffer repeated outages on Tuesday night as Trump took the lead in several major states and his prospects of winning the US presidency turned markedly higher. In the following hours, he won most of those states.
In New Zealand, immigration officials told Reuters on the eve of the vote that New Zealand Now website, which deals with residency and student visas, had received 1,593 registrations from United States citizens since Nov. 1, more than 50% of a typical month’s registrations in just seven days. Visits to New Zealand Now from the United States were up almost 80% to 41,000 from Oct. 7 to Nov. 7, compared with the same period of last year.
Rod Drury, the chief executive of NZ-based global accounting software firm Xero, said the statistics matched up with interest his company has been seeing from prospective US national employees concerned about a Trump win.
Add new comment
Read our comment policy before posting your viewpoints