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I have not researched this but rather than being a sign of IT dysfunction my guess would be the government contracts out the maintenance of the web site to the private sector and the contract specs happen to be written to say it will be closed on nights and weekends. In theory this makes the contract cheaper than if the government was buying 24/7 support.

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It would seem to us that nights and weekends are the most convenient time for citizens to access government services such as this. But the things that are down for maintenance are not our publicly-accessible frontends, they're the backend databases that the administration uses internally as well.

So it would seem that all the worker bees in government offices rely on having access to those backend databases during USA office hours, and the only time they can realistically be shut down is while the civil servants are off the clock.

I view a database that needs to go down for maintenance as "IT dysfunction".

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