The Obamacare website went down on Sunday night after a connectivity issue at its data center – in the latest problem to hit the health insurance program’s troubled rollout.
The data center, operated by Verizon’s Terremark, experienced the connectivity issue during planned maintenance – halting online enrollment at Healthcare.gov for uninsured Americans across 50 states.
It came just hours after Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius praised the data services hub, writing online: ‘The Hub is on the job, and so are we.’
The data center issue also affected similar sites operated by 14 states and the District of Columbia, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Separate technical problems that have stalled enrollment on Healthcare.gov since its launch on October 1 are at the heart of a new Republican effort to discredit the healthcare law, largely through congressional investigations to determine what went wrong in building the costly sign-up system.
Sebelius is due to testify later this week before a House of Representatives committee, while contractors work around the clock to improve the site.
The outage that started in the early hours of Sunday caused the data center to lose network connectivity with the federal government’s data services hub, an electronic traffic roundabout that links the online health insurance marketplaces with numerous federal agencies and can verify people’s identity, citizenship, and other facts.
Without the hub, consumers are unable to apply online for coverage or determine their eligibility for federal subsidies to help pay for insurance premiums.
On Saturday, Sebelius praised the hub’s ability to perform complex calculations in quick time as an example of a successful segment of the system.
Read more: dailymail.co.uk
