That improvident Social Security Institute

Since 1898[1], the National Social Security Institute had never had to face an epidemic of this kind. That much we understand.

What we struggle to understand is how an IT débâcle on this scale was possible.

The facts are well known: at nine in the morning on 1 April the platform set up to receive self-employed workers’ applications for the emergency bonus breaks down. Before that, overnight, it had allowed some three hundred thousand people to submit their applications.

A considerable number, certainly, but a far cry from the pool of potential recipients, estimated at five million. Three hundred thousand, then darkness.

After all, the institute had had several days to get ready to receive applications. But in this case, time did not bring wisdom.

Still, what astonished us most were the excuses offered.

On the one hand, as already mentioned, the high numbers. The institute’s president spoke of “a hundred applications per second” as if it were an exorbitant figure. We would like to know whether Mark Zuckerberg sees it the same way: Instagram has over a billion users and fewer than a thousand employees. INPS has (only) almost 26,000.

Now, for an institutional website that had been preparing for days – or was supposedly preparing – for five million applications to crash under three hundred thousand would be ridiculous enough.

And yet what makes us laugh, even more bitterly, is above all the second explanation.

It is truly insane that President Tridico blamed Russian hackers.

Instead of apologising and doing penance for a scandalous handling of the situation, the institute picks out an invisible enemy. The easiest one to blame.

Then again, the manager in charge of INPS’s IT services states in his CV that he has a “good knowledge of the main internet browsers”. We suspect that may not be enough.

Comme d'habitude, then, our public institutions have not missed a chance to show they are not up to the job (and this, alas, is not the only recent case).

As luck would have it, though, our hapless national institute was rescued by the pornographic streaming site Pornhub. So this time, more than ever, we can truly say: “it all went well and truly tits up”.

In the end, let us remember, there were no resignations – heaven forbid – but not even the semblance of an apology, from anyone. And the money is still nowhere to be seen.

We don’t deserve any of this.

[1] (the year the National Old-Age Pension Fund for Workers was founded, the body from which the current Institute derives)