Obamacare website functionality held hostage, day 5; The frustration and mockery continues

Doug P. | 3:54 PM on October 05, 2013

The identity verification system has already thwarted many Obamacare shoppers, and the problems are persisting in other areas of HealthCare.gov.

The Obama administration announced that the site would go offline during off peak hours over the weekend so cyber-mechanics could put it up on the hoist and see what’s wrong (the problem starts with “we have to pass it to find out what’s in it” and expands from there).

On day five of the launch of Obamacare enrollment, the issues persist:

https://twitter.com/RogerGrahl/status/386577637881024512

Hello downstream error E501 – I have seen you 3 times now on #healthcaregov 🙁 :0 :/ pic.twitter.com/zOLILbiY7M

— Brian Norris, RN, MBA (@Geek_Nurse) October 5, 2013

… still waiting for http://t.co/8ZlBgi5D6Y to load …

— Dean Clancy (@DeanClancy) October 5, 2013

Finally succeeded in opening an account at @HealthCareGov… which I now can't log into. Still, progress is progress.

— Rob Pegoraro (@robpegoraro) October 5, 2013

I still can't login to http://t.co/geqvEy2ZiT #fail

— zachguthrie (@zachguthrie) October 5, 2013

https://twitter.com/mcstweets/status/386491933591207936

@HealthCareGov Is the site back up? I've been sitting on the "We have a lot of visitors" screen for about 30 minutes now…

— JohnT (@jturincs) October 5, 2013

classic MT @jaketapper: “I am president of the Nat'l Assoc of Health Underwriters & I could not get on the Web site" http://t.co/ocSMLOO5QE

— Matt Mackowiak (@MattMackowiak) October 5, 2013

Heh MT @JoanOfArgghh: If you can't get on ObamaCare site, you can at least get onto http://t.co/Z0Wsqab91g FB page. B/c Capitalism works

— Tammy Bruce (@HeyTammyBruce) October 5, 2013

Meanwhile, the White House continues to say that the glitches, outages and other problems are due to extremely heavy traffic, but IT experts interviewed say part of the problem is with system architecture: