e-Petitions service attracts heavy use

e-Petitions service attracts heavy use

Pages on Directgov attracted 2 million visitors and provided 12,000 petitions in first five days

The government's new e-petitions service has attracted a big surge in activity in the two weeks since its launch on 4 August, according to the head of the Cabinet Office skunkworks team.

Writing in the Government Digital Service blog , Mark O'Neill said that in the five days after its launch on the Directgov website it attracted more than 2 million visitors and over 12 million page views. About 12,000 petitions were raised, 700,000 signatures collected and one petition attracted the 100,000 signatures necessary to spark a debate in parliament. At its peak there were more than 12,000 hits per minute.

"To put these figures in context, this is the level of traffic we would expect for the entire of Directgov," he said.

The service crashed temporarily on its first day due to the surge in demand, and O'Neill acknowledged that some technical issues arose in the first few days. These included the firewall configuration limiting the number of connections and affecting the ability of systems to communicate with each other; the search indexing placing too much of a load on the search server, which slowed down queries and the site as a whole; and the time taken in scaling up the number of servers and bandwidth.

Measures are now being taken to overcome the problems, such as adding technical architect capacity to the team; implementing additional monitoring tools; and putting in place processes to enable a quick redeployment of resources to support systems under load.