John Oliver Brings Down the FCC’s Website

As you likely already know, net neutrality has been a pretty hot topic in Washington and around the country (including the Catchpoint offices) over the past several months, with the FCC unveiling a new proposal last month which would regulate the way that ISPs work with companies who provide content.

Not surprisingly, the issue caught on with comedian John Oliver (formerly of the The Daily Show) on his new weekly HBO show, Last Week Tonight this past Sunday, as he uproariously dissected the issue from both a business and consumer perspective.

The most notable moment in that clip, however, comes around the 10:50 mark, when Oliver implores all the internet commenters out there to go take up the FCC’s invitation for feedback by logging onto its site to share their opinions on the issue.

The result was not only immense, but fabulously ironic.

Over the following two days, more than 45,000 comments were made on the FCC’s net neutrality feedback page, causing so much server traffic that they crashed the site.

To repeat: In expressing their outrage over the FCC trying to regulate how ISPs are allowed to deal with high-bandwidth sites, net neutrality advocates overloaded the FCC’s servers with too much bandwidth.

Even those who are against any sort of internet regulation have to admit that’s pretty funny.