Trump State of the Union: Leading fact-checking site breaks in middle of President's speech

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America's leading fact-checking website to broke right in the middle of Donald Trump's controversial State of the Union speech.

Right in the middle of the President's big speech, Politifact – which gives detailed ratings of politicians and other personalities based on their claims – said that its site had fallen over and wasn't working.

"Welp ... our website just crashed," the publisher wrote on Twitter. "Thanks for reading ?!!? We'll keep things up here on Twitter while we see what happened."

About five minutes later, it posted that the site was back online.

In the end, Politifact's conclusion on the President was fairly damning, though not as critical as it might have been.

"Trump’s statements cycled through every Truth-O-Meter rating, except for Pants on Fire," it wrote, referencing the extreme end of the special measure it has for how wild a lie is. "We tallied two False statements, three Mostly False, one Half True, three Mostly True, and one True."

It called out a range of different claims from the President, including a variety of false statements about his tax plan.

The site is used to calling Mr Trump a liar. Before the State of the Union, it collected its previous fact-checking of the President – and found that only four per cent of the things he has said were "true".