In April 2018, the IRS faced a significant outage on Tax Day due to a hardware failure in a Tier 1 storage array, disrupting 59 production systems, including the Modernized e-File platform, which delayed tax filings and payments and resulted in a 24-hour extension of the tax deadline. The incident highlighted the complexities of maintaining government IT systems, which often rely on outdated infrastructure and lack centralized monitoring, leading to delayed responses and widespread impact. Following the outage, the IRS invested in additional storage to increase failover capacity, but the event underscored the need for better observability and automation in government IT environments to prevent similar occurrences. Datadog suggests that its unified observability platform could enhance resilience by providing real-time infrastructure monitoring, correlating alerts, automating response workflows, and offering proactive testing, all of which could help government agencies manage their complex systems more effectively and reduce downtime during critical events.