“This is the moment you were made for, commenters. We need you to get out there, and for once in your lives, focus your indiscriminate rage in a useful direction. Seize your moment, my lovely trolls, turn on caps lock and fly, my pretties!”
Those were the words of John Oliver, host of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight” on Sunday, charging up his audience in a raged commentary on Net Neutrality and the FCC’s plan to allow big telecommunication companies like AT&T and Verizon to charge online websites a fee to use a faster lines to deliver their content.
After Oliver’s call for action, the FCC commenting site was overwhelmed, as users left 3 times the amount of comments the site normally receives, some 3,000 comments from Monday into Tuesday.
The FCC tweeted on Monday that it was “experiencing technical difficulties with our comment system due to heavy traffic,” without elaborating. A spokeswoman for the agency said Tuesday it’s not clear if the disruption was due to the Oliver show.
The FCC’s comments portal is working again Tuesday.
