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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".
How about using the telephone, or calling in at your local Post Office? Both alternative systems and both available.
The sole reason the website broke is because there was a massive upsurge in people accessing it, well beyond the normal rate for tax renewals as people were for some reason waiting for it.
I've done my previous 8 vehicle tax renewals online via the DVLA website just fine (yes, this isn't the first time you could buy your vehicle tax online, they've had it for years, all they are doing now is not sending you a physical tax disc) and the website has been fine - in this case I wouldn't lay all the blame on the service provider as they were working to previous usage levels that have been long established.
As for health care services, well I've never had to fill out a form relating to health care in the UK, I just receive the care that I need. Oh, and I can book appointments, order prescription renewals and even choose a specific doctor to have an operation with online. Have done for years :)
In summary, the system isn't as broken as the story makes out.
This is the dumbest thing. You've been able to renew your tax disc online for years now and the site's always been fine. You don't have to replace you're existing paper disc until it expires so I don't understand how they've taken a functional site, added barely any additional load and made it fall over.
I put it down to many sites saying that anyone can check any cars status on the government's vehicle inquiry service (currently down). Loads of people want to check whether their friends and neighbours cars are legal.
> It's what they can expect every month end from now on.
No it isn't. Literally nothing has changed about the system other than it no longer mails you tax discs afterwards - nobody's leaving anything to the last minute now that wouldn't have before, NOTHING has changed. This is an "odd spike" caused by people seeing the story everywhere of "you can look your car up online!" so instead of the usual trickle of people going there to update their tax once a year, they're getting flooded by half the country going "Oo, a website, must click!"
The summary is BS, all the "before it's ready" is pure fantasy: This is a massive spike in visitors causing an outage, nothing else.
So.. it has come to this
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.