Donald Trump is known to play a little fast and loose with the facts at times. So as the president delivered his first State of the Union address on Tuesday, people were keen to check what he was saying was the whole truth.
So great was the interest, however, that non-partisan fact-checking site PolitiFact crashed during his speech.
"Welp … our website just crashed. Thanks for reading ?!!? We’ll keep things up here on Twitter while we see what happened," the website tweeted, citing high web traffic numbers.
The outage came about half-way through the 80-minute address and lasted about five minutes.
The site, which is owned by the non-profit Poynter Institute and run from a reporting team at the Tampa Bay Times, ranked the veracity of Mr Trump’s statements from "Mostly True" to "Pants on Fire" wrong.
Welp … our website just crashed.
Thanks for reading ?!!? We'll keep things up here on Twitter while we see what happened.
— PolitiFact (@PolitiFact) January 31, 2018
Before the speech, it had labelled 69% of the president’s public remarks as ranging from "Mostly False" to "Pants on Fire".
The crash was mocked on social media, where users joked that his "lies" had broken the website.
Trump literally lies SO much that he broke https://t.co/k1kFWJMp8q —> https://t.co/6k46HFlXA4
— Jesse Ferguson (@JesseFFerguson) January 31, 2018
BREAKING: PolitiFact reports that the F, A, L, S, and E keys on all of their computers have worn out #SOTU
— Rex Huppke (@RexHuppke) January 31, 2018
It’s hard to keep up with all the lies🔥
— Coco (@cocokitty14) January 31, 2018
Thoughts and prayers for @PolitiFact tonight #SOTU
— Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) January 31, 2018
At the start of the month, the Washington Post reported that Mr Trump had made 1,950 false or misleading claims in 347 days, or an average of 5.6 claims a day, according to its database.
The Associated Press, meanwhile, questioned the truth of 19 statements made by the president during the speech.
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