By Kevin Collier - NBC News
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis
briefly extended the state's deadline
to register to vote
this Tuesday after his website crashed in the last few hours.
Florida residents now have until 7:00 pm ET Tuesday to register
online or in person, Secretary of State Laurel Lee said in an email.
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Voters who tried to visit the Florida Department of State website Monday night saw a message from Cloudflare, a cybersecurity company that specializes in mitigating attacks by
hackers
, or hackers, trying to bring down sites with an influx. massive traffic.
The voter registration site received
1.1 million visitors an hour,
Lee said.
But Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said the increase in traffic to polling sites Monday night did not appear to be an attack.
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"Traffic is increasing, but that is to be expected as people are legitimately registering to vote," Prince said in a text message Monday night.
"As of now, there is no sign of malicious traffic on any of the voter registration sites we help protect."
The problems lasted "about seven hours," DeSantis said at a news conference Tuesday.
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Seven organizations filed a lawsuit Tuesday to extend the new deadline.
Andrea Mercado, CEO of the New Florida Majority, a progressive group that participated in the lawsuit, said that at 7 p.m.
there wasn't enough time for people to
know they could still register.
Mercado said
there is always a surge in enrollment as Election Day approaches.
Last week, the New Florida Majority registered 800 people online and another 840 in person.
"It's too bad our leadership in Florida doesn't do better," Mercado said in a phone call.
"He is denying so many people access to democracy."
Florida is one of at least three states whose voter registration sites have gone down
in recent weeks, though it is the only one to do so on the eve of the deadline to register to vote.
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The Pennsylvania Department of State website was down
for more than 24 hours on the weekend,
which the department attributed to a third-party outage.
Also, the Illinois Board of Elections registration website was down for several hours on September 22, National Day to Register to Vote, after social media ads to register
drew huge traffic to its site
, it said. Matt Dietrich, spokesman for the Illinois State Board of Elections.
"When Facebook and Google started pushing this message, we were seeing up to 1.8 million visits per hour," Dietrich said in an email.
"It was still running very slowly for some users, but the vast majority of users were getting error messages throughout the day."
The Illinois and Pennsylvania registration websites have already resumed operations.
Their registration deadlines are
October 18 for Illinois and October 19 for Pennsylvania.