US News

ObamaCare rollout riddled with glitches

The whole government was shut down over ObamaCare — and all Americans got was a lousy error message.

Frustration reigned Tuesday as widespread computer problems kept millions of Americans from accessing online marketplaces where the uninsured were supposed to buy mandatory medical coverage under President Obama’s signature health-care program.

On the first day to sign up, the “NY State of Health” Web site wouldn’t let New Yorkers connect for hours, and then asked everyone to give it a rest.

“Due to overwhelming interest in the NY State of Health — including 2 million visits in the first 2 hours of the site launch — the health exchange is currently having log-in issues,” a banner message read.

In Tribeca, Shireen Imani, 33, struggled fruitlessly all day to purchase a policy and avoid the penalty imposed under ObamaCare’s “individual mandate.”

Although the penalty is capped at $95 for lower-income workers, Imani — who makes more than $200,000 a year running a nurse-recruiting business — could get soaked for 1 percent of her income, or more than $2,000.

After hours of attempts, Imani was finally able to log in and create an account, only to then get booted off the site by an “Internal Server Error.”

At 5 p.m., she gave up after a customer-service rep told her: “Even us, we have a few hundred employees and we can’t log in.”

“I’m bummed. I’ve been trying this for six hours,” Imani said, shaking her head.

Exchanges in 36 states being run by the federal government were plagued by similar problems, with error messages posted on at least 25 of them just minutes after the system went live at 8 a.m.

Obama acknowledged the headache-inducing holdups but defended the rollout during a Rose Garden news conference.

“Like every new product, [there are] gonna be some glitches that we can fix,” he said.

“I don’t remember anyone suggesting Apple should stop selling iPhones or iPods.”

Shortly after 5 p.m., NY State of Health Executive Director Donna Frescatore said the site had received “10 million Web visits.”

Freelance artist Valerie Light, 31, of Brooklyn, said ObamaCare “looks like a bust” after she tried in vain to find out how much a policy would cost her.

“I’ll probably try again in the next day or two. I’m not going to sit here and poke at it like this, though,” she said.

In Connecticut — where experts predicted sticker shock at higher monthly premiums under ObamaCare — restaurant worker John Velasco wasted nearly an hour trying to log on.

“This is really slow. What’s going on? It never takes this long to log on anywhere,” he said inside his family’s Tacos Guadalajara eatery in downtown Stamford.

Additional reporting by Lorena Mongelli, Geoff Earle and Bob Fredericks