Yes it is, isn't it?
I am a computer developer by trade. I am here to assure you that no upgrades, no backups, no 'drills', no 'testing' like this happens on active-users-on-system time. These sort of things occur only on off-hours. All the explanations offered so far DO NOT MAKE ANY SENSE to this computer developer with over 20 years in the field.
Furthermore, such a large system is NOT centralized. A good data architecture would have many redundant copies in distributed servers, synched using normal synching tools. I've personally created much smaller systems with this redundancy and synching. Have you ever heard of an entire large portion of a banking system going down? An entire branch of a phone system? No, you have not. That is because any large and complex system has many different branches or nodes of operability. The concept that one mistake brings it all down -- or even a lot of it -- is impossible.
It’s suspicious, and I’m 100% certain they would never, ever tell us the system was taken down by hackers or some other attack.
One in six people in Illinois leech off of an EBT system. Ignoring the morality of stealing from your fellow citizens for the moment, that’s a very large number of people. I think it’s something on the order of 60 million people nationwide. We simply cannot cut off that many dependents. They will have to be weaned from dependency over time.
Not only that, but these EBT cards are a significant part of sales for businesses across the USA. The loss of that income overnight in our already feeble economy could prove catastrophic. I only hope we can dial this down slowly before it comes apart in the worst way.
We simply can’t afford to keep doing what we’ve been doing (and promising) whether we want to or not.
Not impossible when government contractors run it. I’ve seen billions wasted on systems that don’t work.
But haven’t there been times when large numbers of ATMs and things like that went down?
you sir are 100% correct.
For most companies with mission critical systems, if something like this happened, somebody’s not reporting to work on Monday or any day thereafter. You just don’t design systems like this and put them into production.