Literary icon Margaret Atwood has joined the fight against a consultant’s proposed cuts to Toronto’s library system, marshalling her 225,200 Twitter followers and crashing a server hosting a petition.

At 4:15 p.m. Thursday, Atwood retweeted this from @sonalogy: “Toronto’s libraries are under threat of privatization. Tell city council to keep them public now.”

That drove a flurry of users to the petition and, shortly after 6 p.m., crashed the server of the Toronto Public Library Workers Union, CUPE 4948, which was hosting it.

“We reached our bandwidth limit and the server simply stopped displaying the website for people trying to get on to sign the petition,” said Jim Thompson, who runs the website.

The server was down about 30 minutes.

Atwood has kept up the pressure Friday, tweeting several times from @margaretatwood, including “Here is direct link to the @torontolibrary petition http://t.co/hPNMV8P to stop closure & privatization. Thanks to all, pass it around.”

By Friday evening, the petition had 17,300 electronic signatures.

In a Twitter direct message to the Star, the Alias Grace author wrote that Toronto’s “astonishing” library system serves a huge number and variety of people using it for many purposes. “I’ve done research in them,” she said.

City-hired consultants KPMG suggested Toronto “rationalize the footprint of libraries to reduce service levels, closing some branches.” Also on the block is library outreach and programming.

Councillor Doug Ford, the mayor’s brother and closest advisor, suggested Toronto has too many library branches and said – erroneously – that his Etobicoke ward has more libraries than Tim Hortons doughnut shops.

“It’s a huge plus for our campaign to be recognized by such a prominent writer in Canada,” said Maureen O’Reilly, chair of the library workers local.

“We have other initiatives reaching out to the writer community, so her recognition of this will help us there, and the cause we’re fighting for.

“She may not be as big an icon, to some, as Tim Hortons, but she’s a huge literary hero and her support is amazing.”

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