The sum of the national unemployment systems, generally built prior to cloud scale out architecture, were able to handle 25x normal traffic load (5M claims vs. 200,000 in a normal week, even 2008-2010 peak was 700,000 claims).

Dislike Oracle all you want, even many cloud architected applications would fall over with a 25x traffic increase in a single week (remember Fail Whales?).

That stack was most likely legacy middleware + database backend, a combination of fusion middleware, oracle database, CRM, etc. running on physical hardware or virtualized. Not automated, very basic HA, not easily scalable.

Nothing to do with Oracle Cloud (although Oracle Cloud won't be on my list unless it's marginally cheaper than other cloud service providers).

BTW: Talking about Oracle Cloud, my free tier trial ended miserably, 2 weeks after provisioning the VMs, Cockpit (I run it on my home NAS - managing/monitoring a small group of cloud VPS using the web UI) reported connection failed, only to find that my account has been terminated without any warning or notification along with my 2 free VMs based in Phoenix, lucky that I didn't actually put any workload on it (left them running only - feeling something's gonna happen...), contacted support and was told account deleted, no reason, redirected me to customer support (my oracle support, I couldn't figure out how that works, so give up...). I still don't understand how Oracle Cloud login works...

Do we know if the underlying cloud failed or if it was an application issue? I strongly suspect the latter especially when it comes to government projects.

Oracle middleware and other software services are an abomination. They're up there with JIRA and Confluence in terms of how overwhelmingly complex and slow they run. Sure, you get reconfigurability but if anything Oracle goes down it's far more likely to be their software applications rather than their hosting solution.

> Oracle really should remove its logo from the footers of all those collapsing web sites.

Why remove the logo if you can't see the website? ;)

A single app doesn’t really have any relation to IaaS