Health Exchange Sites Crushed By Demand; Shutdown Blanks Other Gov't Sites

An anonymous reader writes "The launch of a national health exchange site was marred by overloaded servers in several states around the country. In a White House press conference, President Obama said that by 7 a.m., there were over a million users, and he likened the capacity problems to the glitches that Apple experienced after discovering bugs in their rlease of iOS 7. 'I don't remember anybody suggesting Apple should stop selling iPhones or iPads, or threatening to shut down company if they didn't,' the president argued." Meanwhile, a number government websites went blank as a result of the shutdown, instead of simply lying dormant until personnel could return. The National Science Foundation, NASA, the FCC, and the Library of Congress are a few examples.

Comments

Ridiculous stunt

[erroneus]

This "shutdown" is no shutdown. The things people do not want is not to be shut down.

The most telling thing is that the stock market didn't react to this "crisis." If anything will react as an indicator, it's the market. It didn't.

I get the feeling this is an attempt to get people who are already hooked on government to freak out and demand action. As a former TSA screner, I still receive emails from a government employee organization who yesterday pushed out a message directly blaming the republicans and urging recipients to flood the house with calls demanding action. At the top of the list of "hooked on government" are these parasites who skate through life as government employed wastes of money.

To me, this is a "cable TV" moment. The cable TV moment happened to me when I moved to another state and attempted to bribe the cable internet installer to leave the TV signal unblocked. He refused and I have been without TV since that time... over 4 years now. I don't miss it. I never paid for TV and I never will. But now they aren't able to sell ads as effectively because I'm not watching them. (Some cable TV vendors are giving it away for free now because I'm not the only one cutting down on their subscribership numbers.)

Let's all hope we can cut back on government addiction and dependency and that this "shut down" illustrates how much we don't need it.

Re:Ridiculous stunt

[drinkypoo]

But cable TV stole the free broadcast TV signal I once used.

Whatever helps you sleep at night.

Not only is it true, but who fucking cares? It costs the cable company nothing for you to get free cable. It's not theft, it's copyright infringement. I wouldn't pay for the wire to come into my house anyway.

Re:Inaccurate propaganda

[Anonymous Coward]

The servers weren't overloaded because there was too many people checking them out, they just didn't create good websites.

Mod parent up. There's no way the meager demand for Obamacare could overwhelm a 386, let alone an actual web server. They were probably written as some horrible Java enterprise clusterfuck, and were ready to collapse at the slightest breeze.

Don't forget, these sites had one day of QA before being launched. It's no surprise they collapsed. It doesn't indicate anyone actually wants Obamacare, just that - yet again - the government can't do anything right.

Butthurt Obama

[operagost]

Poor wittle baby Obama. Did the big bully pwess make him cwy?

You know, he could try pretending to be a President and not respond negatively to every criticism.