Part of the Social Security website (ssa.gov) only works during certain hours
.. its a website run by the US Government. Why does it have such large downtimes in this day and age?
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The hours unavailable:
| Day | Time Offline | Start | Stop |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monday - Friday | 4 hours | 1am | 5am |
| Saturday | 6 hours | 11pm | 5am |
| Sunday | 8½ hours | 11:30pm | 8am |
| Total | 34½ hours/week |
The first one sounds like "scheduled maintenance" gone awry. Like for something that takes 5 minutes to run that you tell your boss will take an hour, who tells his boss it'll take two hours, boss then says "let's double that to be safe".
I wanna know WHY it is unavailable. Does the system crash if there's not enough paper in the dot-matrix printer? Are the HTTP responses being filled out manually in real time?
We have the same for the tax system in Sweden. The reason there is multi part but two big ones are:
Guarantees around how long time processing your tax information will take. But this gets harder if your information comes in at off hours since the tax information still needs a human stamp of approval (which really is making sure the system didn't flag it as manual review which happens at random and if there are discrepancies)
The second, related one, is that they do batch processing at night and while they could queue data for the next day doing so would require a rewrite of the law guaranteeing a certain processing time, since if your data comes in after the start of the batch run it won't run until the next day, which would be hard to properly inform people about in a way they'll accept. Better then to simply not accept it then.
It's like saying "This law ensures your application will be processed in 48hrs" then everyone rejoice and vote! But instead of adding more manpower to process they limit the application coming in. Sneaky.
While I get your point I don't really agree. This law/requirement on the tax agency predates digital tax forms and is the same if you send in on paper. It's more about how they don't want to make things more complicated by having different rules for different media. It's still so much more simple to use the digital forms / system and very few people actually need these systems online during the night and even fewer companies. The benefit is simply far outweighed by the cost. Remember it would be tax payers that have to pay for the system being available 24/7 with everything that entails in increased support costs and infrastructure costs due to the higher SLA levels required from all parties involved.