On October 10, 2023, the” Campaign Spokesperson of Unity Party Mo Ali during a Facebook post made at claimed that ‘’The National Elections Commission Website is down’’. Mr. Ali exact words were ‘’NEC why is your website down’’?
He was later backed by fellow supporter of the Unity Party, Martin K.N Kollie, who also claimed: “NEC Liberia, your website just went off. It cannot be reached. Why? STOP playing with it. PLEASE put it back on and don’t cut it off again.”
These posts were made at about 10 am on Tuesday — about two hours after polls officially open.
Amid these claims, there were concerns about the NEC website viability during these election process. While these claims made rounds of Facebook, the Deputy head of communications at NEC denied that the website was shut down.
Experts say, although the site was not shutdown, it experienced heavy traffic during the morning hours of Tuesday, thereby causing some issues with accessibility.
So, what happened when a website has heavy traffic verses when it is shut down? Carol Doe is an Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) professional. He explains:
“An HTTP request is an action that an end user performs in return for an end-result from the host which is located on a server. The aim is for the user to access resources on the server or the website.
“An example is a man named John open a web browser and enters a website URL; the request is sent to the server and the server sends back to the user the website that’s found on that URL.
“If the server doesn’t have enough space to handle the multiple requests coming in at once, the server will not return the website / resource to the user until the traffic going to the server subsides. In that case, the website is not shut down but rather, it is irresponsive and cannot handle the heavy traffic at that moment.
“In the case of the speculation that NEC website is being shut down, I counter checked the site and had trouble accessing the main domain at necliberia.org for some seconds.
“After a few minutes, I got access to the site. I also checked all the subdomains (cas.necliberia.org; vc.necliberia.org) and they were all accessible.
“In my opinion, the main domain is currently challenged with the many “http” requests that are being sent and unfortunately, it seems that NEC does not have the server space to handle such requests.”
To put the differences in context, Doe further explains the following:
“Shutdown is when a website or resource has been taken offline completely and cannot be reached at all, even after refreshing, while Heavy traffic is when a website cannot be accessed for some seconds or minutes due to the many requests being sent at once. Once the requests subside, the website becomes accessible.”
How to Check if a website is Down
Meanwhile, it is important to know how to make a determination if a website is shut down. We review several articles by credible online sources.
In this article, produced by WebsiteBuilderExpert, it shows how to tell if a website is down by using one of the best tools to do it. IsItDownRightNow is a great tool for quickly checking the status of a website. All you need to do to use it is follow the following steps:
- Visit the website: https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/
- Type the URL of the site into the text box provided
- Click ‘Check’
- Receive information on the website you are trying to check.
IsItDownRightNow will provide you with a host of useful information, including:
- Whether your website is up or down
- Your website response time
- The last time it was down
This report was developed with the support of Internews through the USAID Media Activity project. The funder has no say in the editorial decision leading to the production of this content.
