Case Study: Department for Work and Pensions scales Universal Credit 10x with MongoDB

Department for Work and Pensions scales Universal Credit 10x with MongoDB

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), the UK's largest government department, faced an unprecedented challenge when the COVID-19 pandemic caused a sudden 10x surge in demand for its Universal Credit welfare platform. The system, built on MongoDB, had to scale rapidly to avoid failure and ensure millions of vulnerable citizens could access critical financial support without disruption.

Using MongoDB's distributed architecture, DWP scaled its platform to eight production clusters totaling 110TB of data, handling over 15,000 requests per second with zero downtime. MongoDB enabled the team to make 76 urgent changes to the application stack and successfully process 100,000 new claims in a single day while maintaining on-time payment rates over 88%. This agility ensured continuous service during the crisis and prompted DWP's planned migration to the managed MongoDB Atlas service for future resilience.