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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsCNN employee's own mistake crashed Obamacare Web page
In a rather embarrassing revelation for CNN, their own “expert” crashed the Obamacare Web site yesterday by doing something that every child in America knows you simply do not do on the Internet: Refreshing the Web page while your transaction is processing.
Yet, an examination of the video reveals that that is exactly what CNN did – their expert refreshed the Affordable Care Act federal exchange site while their application was “processing.”
And what happened as a result? The page crashed. As it does on every single Web site in the world when you’re dumb enough to refresh the page while a transaction is in progress.
-snip-
CNN reporter: Then came the roadblock. Tell me about what happened, because we’re getting another error message here, and it’s supposed to be running smoothly – we’re just not seeing that.
CNN’s Matt: Yeah, so, you know, we’ve been trying to get into this site since October 1, on and off again. I have to say, it did work a lot more smoothly this morning. I got through, I picked my state, I put in all my information, and I got through the whole process in about 8 minutes. And then it said my status was ‘in progress,’ so I went to refresh it and I got the error message.
The rest, including video: http://americablog.com/2013/12/video-shows-cnns-mistake-crashed-obamacare-web-page.html
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CorrectOfCenter
(101 posts)A crash would've been better.
Rex
(65,616 posts)One reason I refuse to watch corporate news, not worth my time and they ALWAYS have an agenda set against the POTUS.
No thanks.
djean111
(14,255 posts)either a second transaction to be initiated, or the page to be cleared out of all data input. Any crash at all is a bug and I would report it as such.
You can't expect that users of a site will behave in a particular way. All inputs must be dealt with appropriately.
alc
(1,151 posts)That's like saying even a child knows not to crash your car into walls so you don't need to worry about air bags.
As a web developer I'm getting sick of all the BS (it makes my profession look bad). I've been doing backend development for high volume, transactional sites for almost 15 years with another 15 years of systems development before that. Even many other web developers I've worked with for the last 5 years believe all the crap people say about low quality being the norm, first releases suck, etc. My profession is the source of much of the BS - trying not to take the blame when they do a bad job. If you don't know what you're doing you'll end up with a crappy site (1st release or 10th). If you know what you're doing, you can build a robust site without a lot more effort.
Try it at your bank. Or Amazon. Or ebay. Or Coke. Or McDonalds. Or any other high volume financial/sales/loyalty/game site built by people who know how to build a web site. Even if every child knows not to do that, everyone who claims to be a professional web developer should know how to keep that from being a problem - it's not a difficult problem to avoid (and you're lucky if a crash is all that happens when the user does it).
