Here in Denmark we received a new tax structure just recently, and one of the items was that people could cash in a sort of “forced tax savings”, which had been 1% over a number of years when the economy was moving very fast. The economical aspect of this isn’t terrible interesting (for this discussion).
But apparently the interest for doing this have been so large that it has crashed the website of the organization which controls this forced saving, because people were interested in seeing how much money they had in their forced savings.
That is the true problem of the internet in its given form. Anything extraordinary happens – and websites can’t handle the traffic. This has been seen multiple times throughout the years, and it is basically a distributed denial of service attack. Sites can’t handle traffic and shuts down. I tried this morning and could still not access the web site, and I tried yesterday around noon. It is a good thing it isn’t a critical service.
I remember back in 2001 when the twin towers were hit. Every news site I knew was down and where impossible to reach. Suddenly the television news channels received a significant boost, because people couldn’t get their news online and we were forced back to early 90s instead.
Imagine something important happens and you have to get access to your home bank, but the bank is down because everybody else is trying to access it as well. Not a comforting thought.
As more and more of our services and daily life starts to be accessible mainly (only) via the internet – this is a problem which will escalate.
Question is if the companies who aren’t ready will want to pay for being proactive with such things, or they’ll just ignore the problem because it is “extraordinary” events which cause it ….. well, extraordinary or just people wanting to get some money.