The website of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party has crashed after speculation the party could support the Tories following a shock hung parliament.
The DUP – which is the Northern Irish Assembly’s biggest political party – saw a hike in numbers of people trying to access its manifesto online as Britain woke up to the election result on Friday morning.
Theresa May and the Conservatives have suffered an embarrassment after failing to secure a Commons majority despite her calling the snap election seven weeks ago.
With less than the 326 seats needed to form a government, the PM must now look to form a coalition with other parties in order to stay in power.
As the results came in overnight, DUP MP Jeffrey Donaldson said the party will be “serious players” if there is a hung Parliament.
He said: “We will go in and we will talk to whoever it is, and it looks like the Conservative Party will be the largest party.”
General Election Night 2017 - In pictures
He added: “We will talk to them, we have a lot in common.”
The DUP have so far won 10 seats, up by two, in the election. The Conservatives are expected to win 318 seats – down 13 from 2015 – with Labour predicted to total 267.
At just after 5.30am , Google saw a peak in the numbers of people searching online for the DUP to try and find out more details about the politicians who could be forming a coalition government.
Thousands of people tried to access the party’s manifesto on their site – www.mydup.com – causing the web page to crash with a 503 server error.
Read More
The error message read: “The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.”
