Canada’s immigration website has suffered an intermittent fault that has made it inaccessible to visitors during the US election vote.
It has led to speculation that the problem is the result of increased traffic from US citizens in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory.
Officials from the Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) service could not be reached for comment.
There are other more likely causes.
“It could just be an extraordinary coincidence,” commented Prof Alan Woodward from the University of Surrey.
Nevertheless, the glitch has been widely commented about on social media.
Image copyright Twitter 
Image copyright Twitter 
Image copyright Twitter 
Image copyright Twitter The issue is not the only glitch linked to the US elections.
Officials were unable to access Colorado’s voter registration database for about half an hour on Tuesday afternoon.
“Unfortunately our system goes down now and then,” she said.
North Carolina’s State Board of Elections switched from using an electronic voting check-in system to a paper-based one at several of its precincts after experiencing “technical problems”.There were also unverified claims that some machines had switched votes for one candidate for another.
“The machines, you put down a Republican and it registers as a Democrat, and they’ve had a lot of complaints about that today,” Donald Trump told Fox News.
However, officials had blamed “user error”.
Elsewhere, a company that had provided a get-out-the-vote telephone and texting service to the Clinton campaign had suffered a cyber-attack causing “brief periods of unavailability”.
The news site reported that members of the 4chan chat site had said they had intended to carry out a denial-of-service attack – which involves flooding a target with internet traffic – which might have been responsible.