Obamacare Website: BORN THAT WAY
(excerpt from Ace of Spades HQ)
First, let's talk about how awful this thing is built.
Five outside technology experts interviewed by Reuters, however, say they believe flaws in system architecture, not traffic alone, contributed to the problems.
...
One possible cause of the problems is that hitting "apply" on HealthCare.gov causes 92 separate files, plug-ins and other mammoth swarms of data to stream between the user's computer and the servers powering the government website, said Matthew Hancock, an independent expert in website design. He was able to track the files being requested through a feature in the Firefox browser.
Of the 92 he found, 56 were JavaScript files, including plug-ins that make it easier for code to work on multiple browsers (such as Microsoft Corp's Internet Explorer and Google Inc's Chrome) and let users upload files to HealthCare.gov.
It is not clear why the upload function was included.
"They set up the website in such a way that too many requests to the server arrived at the same time," Hancock said.
In case you missed it, @johnekdahl noted last night that the administration has reset everyone's passwords in an effort to... I don't even know what. It's a drastic step, though.
Well, I suppose that's one way to try fix this. Generally speaking, the "your username got eaten by the computer machine or lost in the interwebs tubes so choose a different one, and no, we don't know what happened to the original" isn't a best practice solution. If I were a cynic, I might suggest they're just wingin' it at this point.
In other words, the software architecture was set up so as TO PERFORM A DENIAL OF SERVICE ATTACK ON ITSELF! So that it will NEVER work as promoted, no matter how many passwords are changed.