NEW YORK TIMES: …As late as Wednesday, the site still continued to slow down when 30,000 users tried to log on simultaneously, according to project specialists. A batch of hardware upgrades and software fixes scheduled for this weekend, administration officials say, will allow the site to handle 50,000 simultaneous users, as promised, by Dec. 1, which is Sunday.
The Health and Human Services Department announced that the site would be shut down for 11 hours on Friday night to put those upgrades into place, on top of the usual four-hour timeout for maintenance on Saturday night.
Although the administration has postponed a December marketing campaign, fearful that the site would collapse under a surge in traffic, five weeks of repair work have clearly made the exchange better. From last Sunday to Tuesday, nearly 20,000 users managed to enroll in insurance plans, the most for a three-day period, according to people familiar with the project. By comparison, fewer than 27,000 users picked an insurance plan on the federal site in the entire month of October… (more)
