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Alberta Emergency Alert webpage goes down amid wildfire evacuations

The Alberta Emergency Alert website went down on Friday evening, shortly after pushing out an evacuation order for Strathcona County. A person uses a cell phone in Ottawa on Monday, July 18, 2022. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

After two days of pushing out alerts for evacuation notices and orders in response to more than 100 wildfires in the province, the Alberta Emergency Alert webpage went down on Friday night.

Users on social media noticed the website outage at around 8:30 p.m., shortly after the province issued an evacuation alert for Strathcona County, east of Edmonton.

Some website users showed a Cloudflare error, while others were shown a “Http 1.1 service unavailable” error.

The mobile app continues to work and the province advises people download it to see the latest alerts.

Click to play video: 'Dozens of Alberta wildfires force thousands to flee'
Dozens of Alberta wildfires force thousands to flee

The emergency alert webpage showed 36 different critical and advisory alerts before going down.

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“It is reasonable to assume that the RFP to create an emergency alerts website would include a requirement for both availability and scalability to cope with sudden increases in traffic. In this era of cloud computing, it is not difficult to achieve those requirements,” Twitter user @MartinGrasdal wrote.

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At 8:59 p.m., the Alberta Emergency Alert pushed out another notice via social media, including a link to their non-functioning webpage.

A provincial spokesperson told Global News the webpage was being updated due to the high demand it was under. The webpage appeared to come back online at around 10 p.m.

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