Just got email saying important information added to my SSA and needed to login. Thought of posting this in Humor...

[moniss]

5. This question came up on Reddit over 8 years ago

and the least stupid response was this:

"When you design a (IT) system, you say that it will have certain parameters for availability - for example that you guarantee 99.99999% up time in core business hours. Now, there are reasons why you might not want to guarantee availability during particular hours - infrastructure needs maintenance, there might be processes such as batch jobs or back ups that need to happen which might affect the availability of the service, and if the service does go down you need people to fix it (who might not be available equally at all hours).

So you agree the Service delivery parameters, write up an SLA, and go about your day.

In the case of government, they might be going an extra cautionary step in realising that if the site wasn't 100% functional when some random member of the public expected it to be, there'd be all sorts of headaches and questions asked, and staff shuffled around, and reports written. So then they go that extra step and make it really explicit to the "customer" that the service will only be available at certain hours.

Yeah, it's clunky, they could probably do better but then they'd raise your taxes and you'd complain about that instead."