Ex Insider view
Frankly most of the conjecture on posted about this is nonsense.
UCAS has been making the education sector aware of the risk it faces with its IT systems for the past 24 months at least.
Bad decisions by the former Exec team, appaling management of the IT department from 2000 until the start of 2012 resulted in an over staffed and under skilled IT team maintaining. poorly designed and poorly implemented systems that are unable to cope with the demands of the modern day applicant and HEI.
Over the past 18 months UCAS has been working to overhaul the whole shebang and announced at the HEI Admissions conference this year that it would be delivering its A Level results day service from AWS/Azure rather than its current flawed on premise model.
It also announced its intent to Outsource a significant chunk of its IT in 2014..
The fact of the matter is this is a relatively quiet time of year and whilst this outage is unfortunate its at a time that has little or no impact. UCAS will invariably extend any deadlines that were forthcoming so as not to disadvantage applicants.
As long as the systems are up and stable from mid July onwards it won't matter.