ACA Testing Bulletin: HealthCare.gov Could Only Handle 1,100 Users Day Before Launch

WASHINGTON – Obama Administration officials have blamed HealthCare.gov’s disastrous performance on unexpectedly high visitor traffic, but new testing documents released by House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., state that the day before the website launch it was only “able to reach 1100 users before response time gets too high.”

The ACA Daily Testing Bulletin, prepared by Quality Software Services, Inc., lists the testing status and results for various parts of the Federally Facilitated Marketplace (FFM).

On September 30, the day before the marketplace went live, the bulletin states, “Ran performance testing overnight in IMP1B environment. Working with CGI to tune the FFM environment to be able to handle maximum load. Currently we are able to reach 1100 users before response time gets too high. CGI is making changes to configuration.”

Later, under the category “Stress Test,” the report states the goal is to “conduct more thorough testing with FFM to reach targets of up to 10,000 concurrent users in the next few days.”

On October 2, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney blamed the website’s crash on high-volume traffic. “There’s no question that the volume was so high and continues to be so high that that has caused some delays,” Carney said, “Those delays are, in our view, related to the high volume.”

On October 6, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park stated that officials expected HealthCare.gov to draw approximately 60,000 simultaneous users, but drew an unexpected 250,000 visitors. “These bugs were functions of volume,” Park said when explaining the website’s many problems. “Take away the volume and it works.”

You can read the ACA Testing Bulletin here.