And although leaders of the campaign to exit Europe are crowing over their victory, it seems many Britons may not even know what they had actually voted for.
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And as the result sank in, so many people signed a petition asked for a referendum re-run, they crashed the website hosting it.
Eastern time, long after the last vote had been cast, Google Trends reported that searches for “what happens if we leave the EU” more than tripled.
As polls closed Thursday night in the United Kingdom and votes for leaving or remaining in the European Union were tallied, Google saw massive spikes in searches for “What is Brexit?” and, even more alarmingly, “What is the EU?”-suggesting that at least some British voters didn’t really know what they were getting themselves into with this Brexit thing”.
The questions formed the top Google searches conducted on the European Union since the official Brexit result was announced.
Ahead of the poll, the hashtag #IVotedRemain was the top trending topic on Twitter in the UK.
Many voters were surprised to wake up Friday morning to learn that Prime Minister David Cameron had resigned.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Brits want a do-over.
The UK has voted to leave the European Union by an extremely narrow margin, and the world is in turmoil.
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The petition passed the 200,000 mark on Friday evening, with a map of the voting indicating that most activity was in London – where most boroughs backed the “remain” camp in the referendum.
