How Is ObamaCare 'Deadline Day' Going? Not Great

Today's the day: The day the White House pledged to get Healthcare.gov working for the "vast majority" of users. So how's it going? NBC News describes it as being "off to a rocky start." The website was down for maintenance until 8am Eastern today, an 11-hour outage that lasted seven hours longer than a typical maintenance period. But it's not clear whether that's a bad thing, or just a sign that the administration is nervous. If all has gone according to plan, officials said the website's capacity could be doubled, so it should be able to handle 50,000 visitors simultaneously. But tech specialists tell Reuters it will be hard to independently assess whether the site has reached that goal, because any issues that still remain are likely buried deeper in the site.

Tellingly, administration officials said today that 90% of users are now able to create an account, but did not say whether that same percentage would actually be able to finish enrolling. And officials are still warning that there will be times the site is overwhelmed, and are encouraging people to visit during off-peak hours (so, not in the middle of the day). And, as Politico notes, it's possible the site will hold up just fine over the holiday weekend, only to crash again Monday. An official progress report is expected tomorrow, and the Washington Post says administration officials will announce that they met the deadline for improvement—but, the Post reports, not all of their internal repair goals have been met, and it's not yet clear how many people can use the site at once. (An anonymous source even says the latest upgrade, completed overnight, caused error messages to increase slightly, at least at first.)