Once again a site is down due to "normal use"

In an article in Swedish paper SvD it is described how the site where students can get the result of their request for studying at the University went down. The person responsible say simply “it is costly to have a site up and running when it is a one time thing” as an answer to the question why the site was down.

The worst response of all. It shows the person does not know what the goal of the service is. The goal is to give back results when people access his site, especially at the date when the result is released. Is he surprised over the load? If not, why was the site down? If he was surprised, would he be happier if noone used his service?

I was between 1994 and 2000 together with a few more people and Tele2 responsible for the distribution of election results in Sweden from the center that counted the votes and newspapers, radio and tv. What would people have said if our system stopped for even a fraction of a second?