David Cameron is letting people continue to register to vote in the EU Referendum until midnight on Thursday June 9.
Hundreds of thousands of UK citizens flooded to the Government's Register to Vote site last night, causing it to crash.
Reports claim more than 100,000 people were unable to register for the EU Referendum vote before the end of the day yesterday.
The Prime Minister tweeted a link to the registration page and said 'urgent discussions' were underway to make sure people who registered after the deadline can still vote later this month.
It followed a call from the Electoral Commission for the registration deadline to be extended.
Matt Hancock, Minister for Cabinet Office and Paymaster General said in a statement: Following discussions with the Electoral Commission and strong cross party support expressed in the House of Commons, we will introduce secondary legislation to extend the deadline for voter registration until midnight tomorrow.
"Having taken the decision today, we think it is right to extend to midnight tomorrow June 9 to allow people who have not yet registered time to get the message that registration is still open and get themselves registered."
However, a number of Twitter users have slammed the last-minute applicants and don't believe the deadline should have been extended.
One wrote: "Why should they [extend the date]? Surely it hasn't come as a surprise that there is a referendum!? #WakeUp"
The number of people registering to vote in the run up to the EU referendum was tracked on an interactive dashboard.
As the deadline to register to vote loomed, the dashboard shows people flocking to the site at around 10pm last night.
The dashboard, hosted on the government's Performance data platform, also shows a breakdown of applications by type and age.
A total of 525,000 people registered before midnight last night, and at its peak, at 10.15pm yesterday, around 50,700 people simultaneously registered to vote.
Other high points included 21,000 people at 8pm yesterday.
The demographic group most likely to register to vote was between 25 to 34, according to the data, and the vast majority of registrations (515,000)| were digital rather than via paper.
Last week, Facebook encouraged users to register to vote – an update that one Twitter user said may have potentially caused an uplift in registration to nearly 200,000.
A Cabinet Office spokesperson told WIRED: "We became aware of technical issues late on Tuesday night due to unprecedented demand. Some people did manage to get through and their applications were processed. We tried to resolve the situation as quickly as was possible and to resolve cases where people tried to register but were not able to."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
