Washington Healthcare Exchange Back Online – CEO Issues Statement

After spending much of October 1st. floundering and locking out potential consumers,  the Health Benefits Exchange website is back up and running.

Richard Onizuka, the Exchange CEO, issued a statement that in part read:

"As of this morning, we are pleased to report that Washington Healthplanfinder is online. Beginning last night at 8:00 p.m., we conducted a thorough end-to-end investigation of the Washington Healthplanfinder system in order to determine the root cause of intermittent issues such as slow loading times and difficulty completing online applications. After conducting that analysis, our IT team has made some necessary system modifications and deployed a patch to address these issues'

He went on to say creating the exchange was not small technological feat, and admitted part of the issues was the site's inability to handle a high volume of traffic.   Officials claim the number of people who tried to access the exchange far exceeded any potential amount they could have used to test the system before it went operational.

So, in layman's terms,  they claim there was no way to build or prepare the site for potentially tens of thousands of consumers?   Wonder if amazon.com or other major sites  went about launching their websites the same way...

The site, as of this writing, is operational.