N.Y. tourism site freezes up after urging visitors to go to Florida instead (w/video)

ITHACA, N.Y. — A New York tourism office's suggestion that potential visitors should go to the Florida Keys instead ended up crashing its website.

Bruce Stoff of the Ithaca-Tompkins County Convention and Visitors Bureau told the Associated Press on Wednesday that the office's overwhelmed server crashed Tuesday afternoon, not long after news broke about his agency's stunt.

On Sunday, Visitithaca.com posted images of Key West and provided links to Florida Keys websites. The Ithaca site said, "We surrender" and "Winter, you win" and suggested that a visit to Key West was a better option than frozen central New York.

Stoff says his office removed the Florida link because the nearly 150,000 views crashed the website. The upside: Stoff says his office fielded numerous inquiries about tourism in upstate New York.

Ithaca and the rest of upstate New York have been in the grips of a snowy and brutally cold winter. The most recent cold snap sent temperatures plunging as low as 28 degrees below zero in the Adirondacks early Tuesday.