WASHINGTON – The White House chief technology official disclosed Wednesday that the federal ObamaCare Web site still can only handle about 25,000 simultaneous users before it crashes – less than half the target set by the administration.
“Right now, based on what I know now … the thing that I’d be comfortable saying is that the system has been comfortably handling at present about 20,0000 to 25,000 current users,” White House Chief Technology Officer Todd Park told a House panel.
Parks said the Web site, which has been hobbled by glitches and crashes since its launch Oct. 1, was supposed to handle between 50,000 to 60,000 applicants signing up for the new mandatory health plans.
The continued limited capacity of HealthCare.gov cast doubts upon whether the Obama administration can completely fix the site by a Nov. 30 deadline or meet its goal of enrolling 7 million people by March 31.
Pressed by House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), Parks wouldn’t guarantee that the site would be fully fixed by the end of the month.
“The team set a goal of having HealthCare.gov function smoothly for the vast majority of Americans,” he said. “The team is working incredibly hard to meet that goal.”
Fewer than 100,000 Americans have managed to successfully navigate the bug-riddled site and sign up for health plans after more than a month, according to reports.
The disclosure by Park, who was subpoenaed to testify before the committee, came under intense grilling by Isaa.
“This wasn’t a small mistake,” said Issa. “This was a monumental mistake – to go live and effectively explode on the launch pad.”
Park and other Obama administration IT officials who appeared at the hearing insisted that they are fixing the bugs and the Web site is getting better every day.
“We have much work still to do, but are making progress at a growing rate,” said Park.
At a separate hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee, an administration official revealed that Healthcare.gov has been the target of an unsuccessful cyber attack aimed at overwhelming and taking down the site.
“We are aware of one open source action attempting a denial of service attack that has been unsuccessful,” Roberta Stempfley, acting assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Cybersecurity and Communications, told the committee.
Stempfley also said the DHS was aware of “about 16” reports from the Department of Health and Human Services about investigations related to the site’s security.
It was unclear from the testimony whether the reports were related to actual cyber attacks, threats of attacks or other operational problems.
Stempfley said the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the lead health agency managing the rollout of the site, had not sent a specific request for help, so federal cyber officials had not been providing any technical assistance.