Martin Lewis urged people in the UK to check their state pension entitlement and their national insurance record – causing the government website to temporarily go down.
The Money Saving Expert founder shared links to the pensions and national insurance areas of the gov.uk website at around 8.40pm on Tuesday
Quickly gaining lots of likes and retweets, Mr Lewis’s advice resulted in people following the links he had shared.
But so many people did so that the gov.uk website ended up crashing, according to reports by users on social media.
One Twitter user suggested the state pension page was facing issues.
They posted: “Martin Lewis has crashed the http://gov.uk state pension page by the look of it -can’t get in!”
Mr Lewis himself chimed in when he saw others were having problems.
Re-sharing his own original tweet, he wrote: “OK it looks like we’ve crashed the govt site too now... #Oops#MartinLewis“.
Some who were having issues accessing the gov.uk site took to Twitter to express their annoyance.
One person posted: “Unfortunately looks like @DWP cannot cope with the amount of people using the website!@MartinSLewis.”
Another simply said, “maybe do it tomorrow instead” alongside a screenshot of the gov.uk page which read “something’s gone wrong”.
“You’ve just broken the gov website for checking either of these. Will wait till the traffic dies down,” someone else wrote.
Another annoyed user posted: “@itvMLshow You helped to crash the government website for the R40 form I was halfway through completing the form and it crashed. Logged out and back in and same message appears.”
