Yes, the overwhelming crush of traffic is behind many of the Web site's failures. But the Web site was clearly far, far from prepared for traffic at anywhere near these levels. That's a planning flaw: ...
Good article, but I take issue with this point. If anything, that should be expected. For anyone who's followed online services (MMO videogames come first to mind, but many more) for the past decade, they know that this is the norm. Companies are routinely off by at least one order of magnitude. Essentially, it is impossible to know demand. By now there's enough institutional knowledge amongst back-end-service-delivery folks, and enough effective technological solutions lying around, that the federal exchange should be able to ramp up capacity very quickly.