Today was finally the big day. After carefully making all the right arrangements, crossing every ‘t’ and dotting every ‘i’, and most importantly, getting permission from Chairman Rudd, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy was finally ready to reveal to the world his big project.

The National Broadband Network Implementation Study!

But not everything went according to plan.

First, the naughty press secretary hadn’t set up the content management system right, so the nasty reporters saw something they weren’t supposed to when they tried to look at his awesome press release.

Conroy sorted that one out. Hooray! The reporters could read his sensational press release! But then something else went wrong when they tried to access the Implementation Study itself.

But then things only went from bad to worse. When the website worked, the naughty broadband department had not uploaded the report correctly. Naughty DBCDE! Naughty!

Then when the report was uploaded properly, there were too many people trying to access the report at the same time. Everyone agrees: There are too many journalists in general and some need to be gotten rid of. Everyone would find life easier then.

Even after all these problems were sorted out, Conroy couldn’t rest. He still had to sort out the problems with the department’s Wiki page. It wasn’t working either.

What a big day for Stephen Conroy!

Image credits: Delimiter

Related posts:

1. In-flight Internet: Qantas’ failure to launch
2. Dear Stephen, your site is broken again
3. Oh dear: The top ten funniest Conroy YouTube videos
4. Oh dear: Conroy claims “nude DSL” is taking off
5. DBCDE planned for NBN RFP failure

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1. Geordie
   Posted 06/05/2010 at 8:15 pm | Permalink | Reply

   It must’ve been because it was SO popular! Or was that MySchool. Or Grocery Choice. I get confused…

   • Renai LeMay
     Posted 06/05/2010 at 8:18 pm | Permalink | Reply

     Of course it was popular! Because Stephen had been a good boy!

2. Matthew Hatton
   Posted 06/05/2010 at 8:18 pm | Permalink | Reply

   Not surprising given the level of interest really. I can’t imagine that government websites have the capacity to properly handle such a large peak-load that the release of that report would have generated.

   Hell, even companies that deal with that on a regular basis still get it wrong. Look at the various major event ticketing outlets. Every year there’s problems getting tickets to major sporting and musical events.

   This isn’t so much an ‘oh dear’ for Cun….Conroy and the DBCDE as it is just another in a long line of examples of how, sometimes, the internet doesn’t work the way we think it should.

   • Renai LeMay
     Posted 06/05/2010 at 8:19 pm | Permalink | Reply

     Yes but one would expect the broadband department to have a load balancer or two sitting around for this kind of occasion … or maybe they could mirror it on oh … say five out of 50 bajillion government websites.

     How about a torrent?

     • Joel Webb
       Posted 10/05/2010 at 6:22 pm | Permalink | Reply

       If he torrents it, how can he possibly track/filter and manage its delivery.

       Torrents are bad for the internet ok. HTTP all the way, then he can funnel it through the filter.

   • Owen Kelly
     Posted 06/05/2010 at 8:30 pm | Permalink | Reply

     Completely disagree. In this day and age and considering the price of CDN’s its unacceptable for our government to have this type of outage. Considering the $43b proposed for the NBN a few hundred thousand for some quality mirroring, or server/bandwidth upgrades is so obvious its near pathetic it hasn’t been done yet.

     • Matthew Hatton
       Posted 07/05/2010 at 11:01 pm | Permalink | Reply

       Sorry Owen, but until websites like Ticketek (a company that *exists* to sell high, immediate demand products) can manage selling Big Day Out tickets without having a catastrophic failure, I’m going to cut the government some slack.

       Though, as Renai suggests, maybe they should look at torrents or some other form of distributed dissemination.

3. Stuart
   Posted 06/05/2010 at 8:21 pm | Permalink | Reply

   HAHAHA classic, it shows you neither he or his department are fit to tell us what we can and can’t see.

4. Owen Kelly
   Posted 06/05/2010 at 8:26 pm | Permalink | Reply

   With this level of competence in something as simple as delivering a pdf, I can’t wait to see the success and timeliness of the NBN’s implementation.

5. Myke
   Posted 07/05/2010 at 11:43 am | Permalink | Reply

   Ominous snafu? Lets hope they get lucky when selecting who gets the big bucks to build it.