This is not an anomaly. It's the norm for all government projects, and most projects started in established companies that already have millions of users. To

This is not an anomaly. It's the norm for all government projects, and most projects started in established companies that already have millions of users. To be working in these domains, the "doesn't need to scale" mentality" is very inappropriate and I find it to be doing a lot of damages. The guys at healthcare handled most the scaling problems, accounting for the means at their disposal and the time frame they had, judging by what was published in the news. That it took a few weeks to smooth showed that they handled scaling beforehand. A launch from 10 users to 10 million is always a bit bumpy for the initial weeks.