28 Oct Terremark Outage Sunday Takes Down Healthcare.gov
by Jonathan Bentz, Marketing Manager
On Sunday, a Verizon Terremark data center experienced an outage, taking down Healthcare.gov along with 14 state-based healthcare exchanges and the exchange for the District Of Columbia. This is just the first data center-related issue troubling the health insurance marketplace dedicated to providing access to healthcare options for almost 40 million uninsured American citizens.
As of Monday at 3pm EST, there was still no comment on the outage from Verizon or its Terremark representatives.
Terremark Outage And The Federal Data Services Hub
Reuters reported Sunday that the outage caused a failure for the Federal Data Services Hub. The Federal Data Services Hub is a core database installation for Obamacare built by the IRS and Health and Human Services that can process and verify data from seven government agencies as well as Medicaid.
When information is collected from all those government agencies, the Healthcare Marketplace is able to determine identity and citizenship while also providing information on benefit eligibility, federal mandated exemptions, and federal insurance subsidiary grants.
These verifications across databases of multiple government agencies is necessary to determine eligibility for tax credits that reduce the cost of monthly insurance premiums, a key provision of the law.
Without that data hub being fully operational, even having the website-hosted can still lead to problems like this…
Healthcare.gov Terremark Data Center Outage Updates
According to reports from The Chicago Tribune on Monday at 11:30a eastern time, the website itself was back online. Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge confirmed this also via Twitter just before 2:00pm EST.
HHS Says Verizon Terremark has fixed its networking issue and http://t.co/BqypfNkQut is back online. http://t.co/jxZEhWHTRx #obamacare
— datacenter (@datacenter) October 28, 2013
However, the picture we included above was taken several hours after the website was first reported to be back online. So citizens looking to use the website were still instructed to use the phone as opposed to online methods to process anything related to their accounts in the healthcare marketplace.
On another note… you can still create accounts and compare prices for your healthcare coverage. So even though the site was down for awhile, are you any further behind in your transition to Obamacare than you were before the site went down?
While the rest of the country awaits being able to use the healthcare marketplace to navigate new health policy regulations, we will be here to keep you up to date on the technological trainwrecks Healthcare.gov continues to fight along the way.
