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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Peak governmental inefficiency.
No, extreme budget cuts and operational undermining by lobbyist driven right wing politicians who are quite literally trying to take it down.
It's a feature, not a bug.
How and why would that result in a website having limited hours of service?
it's part of the overall enshittification of that which does not benefit the rich
Archaic hardware and software requiring downtime on the backend to do standard maintenance like backups, software changes, changing vacuums tubes, pulling moths out of relays.
As opposed to modern hardware and software architectures that allow for standard maintenance without downtime.
The excuses vary (taking systems offline to run archaic batch processing, pretending to want to protect jobs by not having machines outperform workers, etc.), but the bottom line is that a certain political faction deliberately writes stupid rules like this as sabotage in order to prove that government doesn't work.
It's the same sort of reason why the local license plate office charges a "convenience fee" to renew your tag online even though it costs the public less than paying a clerk to process it in person.
Can you actually prove that? Seems suspect because usually partisan BS remains in Congress, while tiny administrative details like that get written by agency bureaucrats, who in general could care less about said BS.
Not really. The real answer is that different parts of the federal government are underfunded or overfunded according to political ideology and expedience. This is a great example; the SSA is underfunded while the military is overfunded which results in clear performance differences.
You'll never hear a conservative removed about the US military saying that it can't do anything right, and it's like, yeah, duh, because it has a huge fucking budget and basically gets anything it asks for.
Social safety net programs? Not so much.
Legacy software exists everywhere.