02 Dec 2013 Guess It Can’t Handle 50,001

Well, just tried to log on to Healthcare.gov and got this message:

Hmm…this new-and-improved website looks an awful lot like the old clunker.

I don’t know what the problem is, exactly, but here is my best guess:  The administration insisted that with the improvements Healtcare.gov could “handle 50,000 users at any given time.”  Only 50,000?  Didn’t anyone involved in the process think that maybe, just maybe, once we reached the December 1 deadline there might be a surge of people logging on to Healthcare.gov that might exceed 50,000?  By the looks of the above message, it might have been a good idea to shoot for a slightly higher number.

(And while I’m on the subject, what about the December 23 deadline for getting insurance that begins January 1?  Couldn’t a similar surge happen as that deadline approached?)

Oh, well, apparently that 50,000 number isn’t to be taken to seriously: According to the Washington Post, “government officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing operations, cautioned last week that they will not know if they have expanded the site’s carrying capacity to 50,000 users at once until they have that many users online.”  Maybe they now have their answer.

Final thought:  Google handles, on average, 5.1 billion hits a day.  Do the math, and you’ll find that works out to over 59,000 hits per second.   Yet handling over 50,000 users at any given time proves too much for ObamaCare website.  Which is the more accurate description of Healthcare.gov: “Amateur hour” or “sad joke”?