Wasserman Schultz: Busy servers show ‘democracy in action’

{mosads}Rep. Scott Rigell (R-Va.) also sent his constituents to Facebook and provided the number to his Virginia office.

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) tweeted, “Over 3-dozen constituents stopped in at our district offices calling for avoiding default & protecting social security, medicare, etc.”

He added,”That’s in addition to numerous phone calls to DC & district offices—thank you to Mass. for weighing in on this critical issue.”

“Keep calls comin’!” Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) tweeted.

The high level of responses were attributed to President Obama’s invitation to Americans to call their representatives to express their views regarding the debt limit and to urge them to pass a deficit plan to avoid default.

House phone lines peaked at about 40,000 calls between noon and 1 p.m., according to the Office of the Chief Administrative Officer (CAO), while websites crashed due to high visitor traffic throughout the day. 

Caller traffic dipped back down to normal levels after 1, and by about 5 p.m. traffic was back at the usual level of about 20,000 phone calls per day. A number of lawmaker websites remained down from the heavy traffic.

The technical issues seemed to continue throughout the day on Tuesday.