Apparently, tech jobs aren't considered essential in Canada therefore no surprises regarding the poor IT infrastructure.
Ever wonder why Express Entry website has so many login issues? Among other things, their SAML based SSO implementation fails under load. This hurts a lot of folks who are using "Partner Sign-on" feature...
And then why does IRCC sucks so much in processing application? This is what they are doing :
1. They take in application, then some analyst enters its "essential" details in GCMS... manually.
2. They have automated system to generate "refusal" messages. BUT, those are in excel... most likely implemented using VBA. So... a VO uses that to generate the message and then manually copy pastes them to GCMS.
3. Their have a landing portal for CEC that they developed recently.... Its not interated into GCMS. Meaning someone has to trigger it somehow.
4. For certain immigration applications, they make you fill forms in PDF first and then upload to web portal. This means what you enter in PDF is not entered into GCMS right off the bat but saved as an attachment with your application (something they call "e-File"). Now these PDFs auto generate 2-D barcodes / QR Codes that contains encoded information of ALL that you have filled in it. This means somewhere someone or something scans those PDF looking at QR code and populates GCMS.... Rather an awkward way of doing things. They could have avoided this issue by putting all these forms online completely and avoid this PDF business altogether. Heck, local storage and offline apps has been a browser feature since ages. So if their goal was to support filling of form without internet access, that would have worked too!
5. For immigration medical exams, they are borrowing the tracking system from Australia. This means ... well... there is a human element in moving data from one system to another. You take the medical exam, doctor enters data into e-Medical (this is the system primarily developed by Australians for Australian immigration) and then you medicals are assessed by someone from Health Canada. They then put their assessments (as M-codes and S-codes and few more fields) into GCMS ... again manually. Meaning you have a risk of someone getting assessed but their results never making into GCMS. This explains why some folks see MEP appearing towards the end of their processing..
Basically, IRCC express entry is a manual and most paper oriented processing of application trying to pass for a modern software driven system for processing applications. It has too many places in which a human has to basically move data from one application to another. Each of it adds a chance of mistake or missing it altogether. No wonder you have people whose application falls through cracks and never seen for ages till they file mandamus and someone goes looking for those.