While much of the United States government was shut down by the inability of Congress to pass a budget the health care law that was the focus of the disagreement, the Affordable Care Act, went into effect on Tuesday morning with the opening of the online insurance exchanges; heavy traffic caused some technical glitches and shut down some of the websites, according to Reuters.
Early Tuesday morning, mere hours after the exchanges were opened, visitors to healthcare.gov were told that the site was experiencing too much traffic, the Chicago Tribune reports.
"We have a lot of visitors on our site right now and we're working to make your experience here better," a message on the site read. "Please wait here until we send you to the log-in page. Thank you for your patience!"
Once able to login other problems arose including a blank list of security questions and the inability to reload the page without being told the system had crashed. An online chat function aimed to help troubleshoot problems would time-out after 10 minutes with no response from an online agent, according to the Chicago Tribune.
The federal exchanges are serving 34 states while the rest of the states are choosing to run their own exchanges. Some of those websites were also experiencing technical difficulties in the early going; the state of Maryland shutdown their exchange because of the trouble with the website, according to the Washington Post.
"We have built a dynamic system and are prepared to make adjustments as needed to improve the consumer experience," Joanne Peters, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said in a statement. "Consumers who need help can also contact the call center, use the live chat function, or go to localhelp.healthcare.gov to find an in-person assistor in their community."
The technical problems that have happened on Tuesday were expected as millions of Americans attempted to login to the new health insurance exchanges. President Barack Obama warned people not to be discouraged by the issues last week.
"Somewhere around the country there's going to be a computer glitch and the website's not working quite the way it's supposed to," President Obama said. "That happens when you roll out a new program."
Officials within the Obama administration are hopeful that people won't let the first impression left by the faulty website sour them on the program.
"No one is calling on Apple to not sell devices for a year or to get out of the business because the whole thing is a failure," Kathleen Sebelius, the Health and Human Services Secretary, told reporters on Tuesday. "Everyone just assumes there's a problem, they'll fix it, let's move on... Hopefully, they'll give us the same slack as they give Apple."
