One of the few elements of the new Obamacare website that had been working relatively well saw a problem Sunday.
A component of healthcare.gov, the federal application and health care enrollment system, went down Sunday afternoon because the company that hosts the site had an Internet outage.
(AFP/Getty Images/Karen Bleier)
Department of Health and Human Services spokeswoman Joanne Peters wrote on Twitter that Terremark, the hosting company, was "working to fix ASAP."
The federal data services hub, a conduit for verifying the personal information of people applying for benefits under the law, went down in the failure blamed on the outside contractor.
Jeffrey Nelson, a spokesman for Verizon Enterprise Solutions, which owns Terremark, said: "Our engineers have been working with HHS and other technology companies to identify and address the root cause of the issue. It will fixed as quickly as possible."
"Today, Terremark had a network failure that is impacting a number of their clients, including healthcare.gov," Peters said Sunday. "Secretary Sebelius spoke with the CEO of Verizon this afternoon to discuss the situation and they committed to fixing the problem as soon as possible."
[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/HealthCareGov/status/394588669056528384"]
[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/JoannePtrs/status/394583273470308352"]
Reuters reported that this latest outage caused some of the first widespread issues seen on the state-run exchanges, which had been functioning relatively well compared to the glitch-filled federal exchange that serves 36 states. Reuters said those trying to sign up for health care in Connecticut and the District of Columbia, both of which built their own exchanges, would be unable to complete the process due to the outage.
It was unclear whether the outage had been resolved by Monday morning. Late Sunday, Connecticut exchange Access CT said in a statement that it would announce when the issues with the federal system and its own were fixed. No such notification has been released yet.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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