The first and last time a critical data center for Obamacare crashed this past Sunday night [8], leading to healthcare.gov becoming completely inaccessible and thus halting enrollment (assuming there had been any in the first place but of course allowing the government to blame any lack thereof on Verizon), we said "whether or not Verizon fixes the glitch any time soon, or merely lets it linger, one thing is becoming obvious: the Obamacare delay, which was hard fought by the Teaparty, and which was so opposed by the administration leading to the grotesque 16 day government shutdown, has all but become a reality with every passing day. Only instead of someone actually taking responsibility, said delay will be scapegoated on Verizon's data centers, faulty fiber-optic and copper cables, Cisco switches, Syrian hackers, millions of lines of faulty (Fortran?) code, inept contractors, end users who never read the Help.doc file, and everyone and everything else. Just never the government itself." Once again, we were proven correct when overnight the Connecticut state healthcare exchange, "Access Health CT", announced that the Obamacare data hub was "experiencing an outage" on Tuesday evening. The culprit - Verizon once again. Which answered our question: not Syrian hackers or Cisco but, conveniently, Verizon Terremark.
Conveniently, because recall which company was first implicated in the avalanche of Edward Snowden revelations - why Verizon, which before the NSA disclosure, was first said to be the major communication interception hub used by the government. So when Obama asks the firm that gets unknown kickbacks from the government for providing private client data to the NSA, to take one for the team, well... Verizon promptly obliges.
More on this hilarious "coincidence" from Reuters [9]:
"Access Health CT was informed by CMS (Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services) that the Federal Data Services Hub is currently experiencing an outage," a statement from the Connecticut state exchange said.
A similar outage on Sunday halted online enrollment on the federal Healthcare.gov website as well as similar state sites.
An official at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) acknowledged the Obamacare website had been impacted by the problem.
"Tonight, Verizon Terremark again experienced network issues in their data center that caused a system outage impacting the federal data services hub and the Healthcare.gov marketplace application," the official, who asked not to be named, said in an email to Reuters.
"Verizon Terremark is conducting maintenance overnight to resolve their issue with our technical team and when that is complete we will bring our systems back online," the official said.
Verizon's Terremark operates the data services hub that links online health insurance marketplaces with numerous federal agencies and can verify people's identity, citizenship, and other facts.
"We are now undertaking infrastructure maintenance, which should be complete overnight. We anticipate the strengthened infrastructure will help eliminate application downtimes," said a statement by Jeff Nelson, vice president of global corporate communications at Verizon Enterprise Solutions.
"Verizon is committed to supporting our HHS client and stabilizing their www.healthcare.gov [10] website. Since HHS asked us to provide additional compute and storage capacity, our engineers have worked 24/7 to trouble-shoot issues with the site," the statement said.
And once the Verizon wildcard is used a few more time, ostensibly every single day allowing the Obama administration's apparatchiks an explanatory loophole why Obamacare enrollment is in the single digits, then come the Syrian hackers of course.
