UPDATE: Internet Slowdown numbers even bigger than we thought!

We have the latest numbers from the Internet Slowdown day of action, and a few awesome screenshots to verify them.

We’re proud to announce that the Internet Slowdown generated an incredible response! The flood of comments coming through Battleforthenet.com was on the same order of magnitude as the total comments the FCC has received over the entire comment period. Suffice it to say the response quickly overwhelmed the FCC’s comment submission system early on Wednesday; the load was so large that they still don’t have all the submissions in the docket yet. That’s why the FCC does not have an official tally at the moment.

Note: A few news outlets have incorrectly reported much lower numbers, which were provided to reporters in error by the FCC. The number the FCC gave was just the number their failing website was able to process at the time. Since Tuesday, we had been working with the FCC to help make sure their servers stayed up. Early Wednesday, the FCC asked us directly to stop our submissions until the site came back online, or until they could find new ways to accept them (which they announced, late yesterday).

The FCC communications team knew this at the time, but one of their spokespeople (we hope in error) provided the misleading 100,000 number to reporters. We asked the FCC several times to correct this error publicly in the form of a tweet. They have not done so yet.

UPDATE: The FCC has just published partial numbers totaling over 3 million, implying a jump of well over 1 million during the #InternetSlowdown. Thanks to the publication of this new total, journalists should be able to infer from this number that the 100,000 number was an error.

They have said that a final count is coming on Tuesday, that any number up until now hasn’t been official, and that they may publish a preliminary count this weekend. We’d welcome that. The sooner the 100,000 number gets corrected the better.

The final number, when it arrives, will be huge.

For now, the latest Internet Slowdown numbers are:

Number of websites participating using our tools: 40,806

Calls made to Congress: our number + tumblr # + 30,000 from other companies: 312,171

Emails sent to Congress via battleforthenet.com: 2,332,092

Comments filed at the FCC via battleforthenet.com: 777,364

Peak calls per minute to Congress from battleforthenet.com: 1,000

Facebook shares of spinning icon: more than 1,120,000

These numbers represent only the statistics that we can easily count and verify. Many websites directed people to call their representatives using other tools, or linked directly to emails for lawmakers and the FCC, so we know many more people took action on September 10th.

These numbers are higher than previous numbers we released on Wednesday, as more submissions have come in, and we’ve received more stats from participating websites. Also, our system for automatically counting the number of sites that had installed the widget was overwhelmed early during the protest, and when we looked into it we realized the number was much higher than we had originally reported (over 40,000 – not 10,000).

Check out our infographic for more of the story: https://battleforthenet.com/sept10th/#infographic

Read below for technical details regarding the numbers.

40,806 sites participated using our tools:

Phone calls:

The Internet Slowdown generated 312,171 phone calls to lawmakers. During peak hours, the rate of phone calls surpassed 1,000 calls per minute.

Here’s a screenshot from the back-end of the Twilio account used for calls from Battleforthenet.com, showing 143,074 calls completed:

Here’s a screenshot from the Mobile Commons account Tumblr used for the calls they drove from their https://tumblr.com/stop page showing 136,307 calls completed.

Additionally, Kickstarter, Etsy, and other sites helped drive more than 32,790 calls from their own tools.

Adding these numbers together: 143,074 + 136,307 + 32,790 =  312,171 calls

Finally, here is a screenshot from 9/10/2014 Noon EST showing 1,000 phone calls per minute:

Form submissions resulting in FCC comments and emails to Congress:

777,364 people used Battleforthenet.com to submit a comment to the FCC on September 10th, and to trigger emails to their representatives. Each person sent 3 emails (one to each Senator and one to their rep in the House,) resulting in the total number of emails sent: 2,332,092

Here is a screenshot from the back-end of our Compose.io account showing the 777,364 submissions:

Other big numbers that have come in but were not included in our roundup include, OpenMedia.ca’s reported 150,000 actions taken, and the many more comments that websites and national grassroots organizations submitted directly to the FCC.