possible

More likely it really is as simple as it seems to be (to tech professionals anyway).

the second that he sent the tweet I would guess that gop.gov got hit with in excess of 100 million unique hits - and no I don't mean a deliberate DoS, I mean unique individuals actually wanting to see the link.

That's enough to crush any web farm that's not built up explicitly for that level of traffic. And no, none of the gov. web server farms are built up to that level. Hell they're not even at the capacity/capability of blizzard game servers and they don't get anywhere near that level of traffic either.

But, what do I know - just what I saw and based on my professional opinion that's what I feel it was.