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UK Government Tax Disc Renewal Website Buckles Under Pressure
An anonymous reader writes When you pay the tax on a road vehicle in the UK, you used to get a paper "tax disk" to affix to the inside of your car windshield. However the relevant records are documented electronically anyway, inspiring the government to replace the paper system with a purely online one. Unfortunately said system was still in beta when it launched today and predictably, it has broken under user demand. No alternative system is available. (The licensing agency actually ran out of the paper disks more than a month ago, and has been printing them out on normal office paper and asking vehicle owners to cut out the circle themselves.) The initiative is part of a larger "digital-first", restructuring of how the government provides services aimed at "meeting user needs".
Survivorship bias. You only read about them if they fail. You don't read about the ones that work because it's kind of a boring headline: "Computer system works properly; nobody complains"
Also I can count a large number of non-government systems that have folded under the zero-day load.
This is bullshit. The website didn't fail on the 1st day. The website has been working for years. The problem is that it didn't scale perfectly when the load dramatically increased.