Guido had loads of emails yesterday from people saying they couldn’t sign the petition on the Downing Street website. Many were greeted with this message:
ERROR
The requested URL could not be retrieved
While trying to retrieve the URL: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/please-go/
The following error was encountered:
- Unable to forward this request at this time.
This request could not be forwarded to the origin server or to any parent caches. The most likely cause for this error is that:
- The cache administrator does not allow this cache to make direct connections to origin servers, and
- All configured parent caches are currently unreachable.
Guido contacted Tom Steinberg, the über geek in charge of the petition project, he confirmed that there was a problem yesterday. His technical explanantion was “something broke whilst being upgraded. Bloody computers, eh.”
UPDATE : More people have now petitioned for Gordon to Go than voted for him in his constitutency. If a couple of thousand more people sign the petition before midday, Dave will be able to tell the Prime Mentalist at PMQs that the most popular petition on his own website is the one wanting rid of him. Hint to Dave’s PMQs preparation team: namecheck the petition at PMQs and it will go ballistic. Worth it just to wind up Gordon into smashing a computer screen with a flying Nokia.
