A national activism group's action alert opposing the gay marriage amendment on Sunday spurred enough e-mails to crash servers at the Minnesota Senate.
Secretary of the Senate Cal Ludeman said their e-mail servers received about 235,000 messages between 4 p.m. Sunday and about 1:45 a.m. Monday, when the traffic eventually caused them to fail.
Normal e-mail traffic during that time? About 2,000, Ludeman said. The servers were restored at about 6:30 a.m.
This coincided with an action alert sent by the Washington, D.C.-based Human Rights Campaign to their e-mail list, asking Minnesota activists to "Email legislators who voted to put the lives of Minnesota families to a popular vote." HRC is the largest LGBT civil rights organization in the country.
Ludeman said they redirected the e-mails, which came in large batches, to an archive file so normal activity could resume. They plan to slowly funnel them to lawmakers starting tomorrow.
"We're not certainly used to that kind of volume," Ludeman said.
Sen. Scott Dibble claimed this morning on MPR that the e-mails were being deleted. Ludeman said they were not deleted.
HRC president Joe Solmonese responded in a statement that blocking, "or possibly even deleting those messages, is absolutely unconscionable."
