 As y'all know, we had a pretty big election this past Saturday - the entire state government was up for election. I bring this up because there were several malfunctions with the Secretary of State's website on Saturday night ... from not being able to log in, to logging in and being directed to results for (insert Parish name here) Parish when one was looking for the Statewide results, and so on.
Today, The Advocate, in an article that is on their front page, but apparently not online, quotes Secretary of State Jay Dardenne saying:
"We were just overwhelmed."
Oh, really, Mr. Secretary? Isn't your job to be prepared for something that EVERYONE saw coming? I mean, the article expresses wonder at the fact that the Election results page drew some international attention! For the love of God, we have the son of immigrants from India running for Governor, and you're unaware that maybe, just maybe, the website is going to get a ton of traffic?
I understand that you're used to only 50k visits over a two day period at the Secretary of State website, but come on, Mr. Secretary, you should have been prepared for the onslaught of website visitors, even if some 6.2 million hits were recorded according to that Advocate article, especially when you have what outsiders consider a novelty occurring: an Indian-American being elected Governor in a Southern state.
What really gets me is that there were only 27,000 unique visitors at the site when all the problems were occurring, leading me to believe that your servers are in dire need of an overhaul ... especially since the portion of the site that folks were accessing was essentially text. Beef up the servers, Mr. Secretary. It's your job. |
