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LONDON — Britain’s exit from the European Union, which entered uncharted territory weeks ago, is still straining the government in unexpected ways, even setting a record.
As Prime Minister Theresa May limped home from Brussels on Thursday with an agreement that seemed to raise the odds of a chaotic no-deal Brexit, ordinary Britons were scrambling to add their names to a largely futile petition to cancel the whole deal — crashing a parliamentary website.
By Friday, the petition, called “Revoke Article 50 and remain in the EU,” had more than three million signatures, and the numbers continued to grow. But on Thursday, the Petitions Committee in Parliament apologized profusely and repeatedly after the website went down under the strain of the response to the popular initiative.
Millions of signatures to cancel Brexit will not, in itself, cancel Brexit.
Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon governs the withdrawal of a member state of the European Union. Britain’s Parliament invoked that provision and only Parliament can reverse that decision.
But signatures were coming in at the highest rate ever for petitions on the site, the committee said. On Thursday night, 80,000 to 100,000 simultaneous views of the petition were recorded, and it collected nearly 2,000 signatures every minute, the committee wrote on Twitter.
“I think now it’s almost like a dam bursting,” Margaret Anne Georgiadou, who started the petition, told the BBC.
Celebrities like the actor Hugh Grant and the singer Annie Lennox said they had signed the petition.
Prominent Brexit opponents in Parliament have also supported the petition. Anna Soubry, a lawmaker who broke from the Conservative ranks last month, said she was “not surprised millions are signing the petition.” Andrew Adonis, a Labour member of the House of Lords, said he would move for the revocation of Article 50 in the House of Lords on Monday.
As many Britons used the petition to channel what appeared to be their wish for a second referendum to remain in the bloc, the petition gained steam with less than a week left until Britain was scheduled to leave on March 29 — a deadline now pushed back to at least April 12.
“I became like every other Remainer — very frustrated that we’ve been silenced and ignored for so long,” Ms. Georgiadou told the BBC.
The petition has been online since last month, and it initially struggled to gain attention. “I nearly gave up, but then I contacted a lot of people and it took off,” she added.
Such petitions going viral have prompted responses from lawmakers, and gathering 100,000 signatures makes a petition eligible for debate in Parliament. In the past two years, Parliament has debated 55 of them, on topics like the sale of fireworks and the country’s health service.
On Monday, the House of Commons debated a petition to “Ban all ISIS members from returning to the UK, remove their citizenship and passports,” which had gathered more than 600,000 signatures. It appeared to have been inspired by cases like that of Shamima Begum, a 19-year-old Briton who had joined the Islamic State in Syria and married a Dutch fighter for group, but has pleaded to be allowed to return home.
The British government has revoked her citizenship, an action that could face a legal challenge.
Any citizen or resident of Britain can start or sign a petition to Parliament. Once it gets the support of five people, in addition to its creator, it appears online and remains on the website for six months.
Nine debates have been held on topics related to Brexit because of such petitions. On Monday, for example, lawmakers discussed a call to cancel Brexit in the absence of a deal. In February, they debated a petition demanding that Brexit must not be stopped “under any circumstances.”
Neither debate appeared to have changed the course of Brexit. Still, people were still signing on Friday.
“The most important thing to do in the coming days (along with the petition & march) is to resist the desperate attempts of senior Brexiters to cast criticism of them as insulting Brexit voters,” James O’Brien, a talk-show host known for fighting Brexit on the air, wrote on Twitter.
A map on the website showed that the highest number of signatures for revoking Article 50 were coming from cities like Edinburgh, Scotland, and the English cities of Manchester, London or Liverpool, where a majority voted in the 2016 referendum to remain in the European Union.
Shortly after the vote, a petition to hold a second referendum went online. It gathered more than three million signatures. But the Petition Committee, moving to ensure the process was legitimate, removed 70,000 signatures because they had been created by bots.
