IT outages are an ongoing problem for the US government

When Healthcare.gov was launched in October 2013, it gave millions of Americans direct experience with a government IT failure on a massive scale.

But the overall reliability of federal IT operations is being called into question by a survey sponsored by Symantec that finds outages aren't uncommon in government.

pecifically, the survey found that 70% of federal agencies have experienced downtime of 30 minutes or more in a recent one-month period. Of that number, 42% of the outages were blamed on network or server problems and 29% on Internet connectivity loss. The report, which provides a network for government IT professionals, suggest that downtime is a systemic issue.