Fox News website appears to briefly go down as states continue to count election votes

• Fox News’ website, which the network said averaged 100 million monthly uniques in 2019, stopped displaying articles for around 30 minutes, users reported on Wednesday.
• DownDetector, a site that identifies online outages by collecting social media posts, reported that users began having problems accessing the Fox News website at 2:32 p.m. EST. 
• A Fox News spokesperson declined to comment on the record on the reported website issues.
• Fox News had angered conservative pundits on election night after the network projected Joe Biden would get the necessary votes to win Arizona, a swing state, well before other major networks. 
• Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

Fox News website briefly stopped displaying articles on the day after polls closed for the 2020 presidential election, according to user reports.

The conservative publication’s website stopped displaying stories around 3 p.m. EST on November 4. Fox News’ website averaged 100 million monthly uniques in 2019, according to Digital editor-in-chief Porter Berry.

DownDetector, a site that identifies online outages by collecting social media reports, tweeted that users began having problems accessing the Fox News website at around 2:32 p.m. Eastern.

A Fox News spokesperson declined to comment on the record on the website outage, but pointed to the fact that the site was running at the time (3:24 p.m. Eastern).

Fox News angered President Donald Trump’s campaign and right-wing pundits after the network called that Joe Biden had enough votes to win the swing state Arizona well before other major networks. Former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sander and Fox News host Tucker Carlson publicly criticized the call, The Daily Beast reported.

Business Insider has not yet called Arizona for either candidate. 

Fox News Decision Desk director told Business Insider that the company was better equipped to count mail-in votes in 2020 by using a new method of calling races. The company made calls using a variety of datasets, including interviews with 100,000 Americans before Election Day on whether they would vote by mail or in person.

"We were very much told by our leadership here at Fox that we're not here to try and do something that's designed to give us a competitive advantage," Fox News Decision Desk Director Arnon Mishkin said in an interview. "We're trying to do something to improve the accuracy of the system."