In 2016 Australia's online census failed. Preparations for the 2021 edition have been rated 'partly effective' In 2016 Australia's online census crashed and burned after legitimate attempts to complete the survey were mistaken for a DDoS attack, the routers funnelling traffic failed, and disaster recovery plans did likewise. A probe into the fail revealed poor planning, little testing, and many red faces. The mess ultimately saw IBM …
What's fundamentally missing from all these big projects world wide is management with foresight. Every decision seems to be knee jerk, and no consideration is given to the possibility of anything untoward occurring. In a rule-based culture, it is assumed that [a] the rules will always be followed and [b] the rules are adequate. The very same culture drives the technology development - testing is in my experience commonly limited to ensuring that what should happen actually works. Verification that what should not happen can't happen hardly ever gets done. So it does happen.
Governments are particularly prone to that outlook. I think it's because they make laws which are supposed to be obeyed so there's a presumption that they will be. The evidence given by the existence of a large law enforcement system is overlooked. There's also an assumption that laws will be obeyed in the way they intended - it's the sort of thinking that sees nothing could possibly go wrong with back-doored encryption.
Not everyone skimps on the planning. I was on the security team for the 2011 UK Census (the first UK census to invite online participation by the public). Without going into detail here, we anticipated many different failure modes, and we even ran a simulated failover from one processing centre to another centre in another part of the country. Just in case a building got taken out.
We also put a whacking great filter / load balancer on the Internet-facing side, so as to be able to handle the anticipated (peak) traffic. Our assumption was that everyone and his/her dog would try to log on as soon as the system went live, from all over the UK (which would effectively mimic a DDOS attack). We also set it up so that if the traffic level got too high, the system would divert traffic to a simple "busy right now, try again later" page.
Effectively, we have the same Government as we had in 2016.
Bush fire preparedness: Fail (still done nothing)
Robo-Debt: Illegal, people died
National covid response: NSW is doing a fine job, but stuff the Labor States
Sports rorts: Well, um..... moving on
Census 2021: Write your own adventure.
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