On the last official day to sign up for health insurance on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplaces, the main federal site — HealthCare.gov — went down for four hours, directing visitors to a virtual waiting room or just alerting them that the site was offline for "maintenance."
Normally, maintenance on the site is done by 5 a.m. EDT, but today a "software bug," according to a Health and Human Services (HHS) statement, kept it inoperable for an extended period. HHS denied the site had been hacked or that it crashed because of a heavy load.
HealthCare.gov averaged 1.5 million visits a day last week, but that number jumped to 2 million over the weekend.