It's not an either-or proposition

Posted by Sir Four at 3:14pm Oct 24 '13
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It seems high load and bad design combined to cause problems for users. But you said:

Meanwhile we were told for weeks that the "glitches" on the Obamacare exchange website was due to high traffic, only to later learn that a) there wasn't high traffic at all, and b) the glitches are technical in nature, not due to load.

I believe something like 9 million unique visitors hit healthcare.gov in the first week, which is pretty high. The site's poor design made it all the worse. Under a smaller load the site probably would've functioned as expected, despite it's flaws. It was probably tested with a light load only, and someone decided it was ready for launch based on that.