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> if you've never had to deal with a traffic spike, you probably aren't going to build for the scale issues you will have.

One question would be whether they hired people/firms who had had to deal with that level of scale before.

I'd assume not.

But apparently they hired someone who didn't even know enough to know that they were not qualified to do it.

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One side effect of the complexity of government contracting processes (designed, in principle, to ensure that the government doesn't get taken advantage of by either internal or external actors) is that the people who get awarded government contracts are often the people with the most skill in negotiating the government contracting process, not the people with the most skill in the problem domain.

We know who built Healthcare.gov; it was Development Seed. There were a bunch of stories about it earlier this year. Development Seed also built and runs MapBox, so they should have some idea how to run a high volume web service.

And the front end built by Development Seed has had no problems. It's been the marketplace built by another contractor.

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