The FCC has received tens of thousands of comments on a proposal that would let ISPs charge Web services for Internet "fast lanes," but yesterday the commission's comment site struggled for a good part of the day.

The problem happened after comedian John Oliver spent 13 minutes on his HBO show, "Last Week Tonight," ripping the FCC's proposal apart. He proposed changing the name "network neutrality" to "Preventing cable company f**kery," and finished by calling Internet trolls to action:

I would like to address the Internet commenters out there directly. Good evening, monsters. This may be the moment you've spent your whole lives training for. You have been out there ferociously commenting on dance videos of adorable 3-year-olds, saying things like, 'every child could dance like this little loser after one week of practice.' ... This is the moment you were made for, commenters. Like Ralph Macchio, you've been honing your skills, waxing cars, and painting fences. Well guess what, now it's time to do some fucking karate... We need you to get out there and for once in your lives focus your indiscriminate rage in a useful direction. Seize your moment, my lovely trolls, turn on caps lock, and fly my pretties! Fly! Fly! Fly!

With Oliver's trolls having been activated, the FCC's Twitter account said yesterday, "We’ve been experiencing technical difficulties with our comment system due to heavy traffic. We’re working to resolve these issues quickly."

FCC CIO David Bray noted last night that the system is more than 10 years old and pointed to an article on how the FCC is trying to modernize infrastructure badly in need of upgrades.

The comments site (fcc.gov/comments) seems to be back in working order this morning. The net neutrality proceeding has received more than 47,000 comments in the past 30 days. Bray and an FCC spokesperson contacted by Ars said it isn't clear whether the website's problem was caused by John Oliver's call for comments, but the spokesperson said, "it was down for a couple of hours yesterday due to high volumes of traffic."

Bray said today that the "team checked this morning [and] all looked fine internally."

The FCC is also accepting comments via e-mail at openinternet@fcc.gov. Initial comments are being accepted until July 15 and reply comments will be accepted until September 10.