Part of the Social Security website (ssa.gov) only works during certain hours

We know why but pointing out how Republicans only policy position is "explicitly kneecap everything so we can privatize it and funnel money to our friends at non negotiated rates 5x the normal end user retail cost" is apparently not allowed because some guys like guys and some people want to alter a pronoun by one letter or some such shit.

I’m going to have a guess and suggest that the website is probably integrated with some much older mainframe system and a batch process or several batch processes run daily overnight to shuttle data between the two systems to keep them updated and in sync.

Syncing the two sets of data while the database is live and changing is a pain the the bum, so they freeze it while the data transfers are taking place.

I particularly enjoy the "if you need immediate assistance" note for a telephone line that's open even fewer hours than the website. it's positioned as an alternative to the site, but absolutely isn't. Also, if that message is only displayed when the site is closed, there are no hours when the phone line is open but the site is closed, so who's it helping? You couldwrite it down and call it when it's open, but the site is also going to be open then, several hours earlier in fact, so is less "immediate" than the site that's closed.

Well damn, that web server has a good union.

The hours unavailable:

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?

Most government sites from NY also keep business hours

I asked my family's lawyer about it and he said that the time open and closed is a law. So they have to "close down" certain sites at certain times to comply with those laws

Permanently Deleted

I've seen websites of local stores in the bible belt that weren't reachable on sundays, but a government site not working at certain times is just weird and backwards.

One might say that this website has some of the best union behind it, perharps on the entire planet.

Maybe they need to send you your http request manually

Well, you see now, if you reverse the letters in the website address it spells exactly why it has issues.

...aand, we're back to Web 0.0.

By the way, is this how most sites are going to work in Metaverse?

...so it would be stupid if this works, but it's a stupid problem in the first place, so try changing the time on your computer to be within their operational hours.

I recall cheesing videogames with that back in the day, and the UI of a halfway decent videogame would put most govt web design to shame. Worth a shot?

In Finland you can access your info and do online forms any time of the day. The information gets updated when it gets and the site has the newest version available at the time. When they do maintenance, they inform it couple of days before on the website.

The NC unemployment was website goes offline for maintenance every night. It's so needlessly complicated on purpose.

In my experience, it frequently doesn't work within posted hours either
cries in SSI

Assuming this isn’t a chat functionality that requires humans to function, maybe it goes down for maintenance over that outage period. If so, it’s terribly designed.

Could be too limit the number of requests that ultimately ended up needing to be processed by a "real human". Knowing government that was human might be literally some person in the back transcribing the digital requests to paper so that some technophobe boss can review or file it....

Wdym taxes aren't going where they benefit people?

I for one am ready for a public servant AI that gives you form Y34-b and sends you to another AI that then tells you it should've been form Y34-a and only the third AI can fix it but they're currently on vacation so you'll have to comeback another time on a Monday or Wednesday between 10:00 and 10:30am.

.. its a website run by the US Government. Why does it have such large downtimes in this day and age?

In case you were unaware, the US government sucks at everything but killing people, and sometimes they take 20yr to do that. They just flat out suck, there's your "why."

Having worked for social security for 5 years, and now 20 years in IT, I'm totally not surprised. No idea what part of this website is, but you can either afford redundancies or downtown.

the university I attended freshman year was ranked top 10 in the US for comp sci (at least as of 4 years ago), yet some of their account management stuff on their website wouldn't be accessible after like 7pm. absolutely insane

it says try in Easter time, you have a lot to wait

common government L

Maybe it is easier to negate attacks if they only have the system available during working hours?