Crashed: Obamacare Exchange Sites Experience Nationwide Outages

The Obamacare health care exchanges went live Tuesday morning as thousands of previously uninsured Americans flocked to enroll via the online marketplaces.

But there seems to be a problem: people looking to sign up for the government-run exchanges are experiencing some pretty severe technical difficulties, according to anecdotal evidence.

And it looks like the glitches are being felt nationwide:

Looks like no one in Oklahoma is going to be getting obamacare today! pic.twitter.com/vonF9Pwgo6

— Jon Gross (@grossjon) October 1, 2013

Would be nice if we were discussing this disaster instead of a govt shutdown. Well played. pic.twitter.com/Abgjcquybz

— David Freddoso (@freddoso) October 1, 2013

@SenTedCruz day one obamacare: the oregon exchange is down! pic.twitter.com/GLXwYbjtz4

— DaylightDisinfectant (@daylightdis) October 1, 2013

Wanna chat with someone about enrolling in #Obamacare? "No such user exists" pic.twitter.com/osCXxhF92g

— mwbowler (@mwbowler) October 1, 2013

It’s 12:09 a.m. EDT and the #ObamaCare exchanges do not work. #Glitch pic.twitter.com/L0wSaS8xI8

— Cong. Tim Huelskamp (@CongHuelskamp) October 1, 2013

3 steps into the new health care exchange website and it's already not working. Typical 4 our government! pic.twitter.com/yl3ZfhrkOy

— Randy Carder (@Randy_Carder) October 1, 2013

@HealthCareGov "Important: Your account couldnt be created at this time. The system is unavailable." pic.twitter.com/VKQqfAe5A2

— Lou Rain (@ljrain)

October 1, 2013

Even TheBlaze’s own Mike Opelka couldn’t get through to the site. Here are a few screen grabs from his failed login attempts:

Image: Screen grab healthcare.gov

Image: Screen grab healthcare.gov

Now it’s important to note that the site just went live at 12:00 a.m. EST. It was no doubt flooded with thousands of Americans waiting for their chance to sign up for the exchanges. That kind of traffic flow could easily overload and crash a site. So maybe the site’s not that faulty. It may simply be struggling under the weight of heavy online traffic.

Still, the feds have had since 2010 to lock this down. How is the site not ready for primetime? Did no one anticipate heavy traffic?

So many questions.

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Follow Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) on Twitter

(H/T: Twitchy). This post has been updated.

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