IT Pros Call Out Healthcare.gov For Lack Of Cloud Computing Prowess

IT industry experts said the launch of Healthcare.gov this month was hobbled by a byzantine, "old-school" infrastructure. Could cloud computing have solved the site's performance problems?

In a world where billions of users log on to Facebook every day without a second thought, the idea of a website collapsing under a load of visitors is foreign.

But Healthcare.gov, the portal through which Americans shop for health insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act, experienced freezes, crashes and other glitches when it officially opened Oct. 1. Problems persisted throughout the ensuing week as government IT scrambled to stabilize it amid the ongoing government shutdown.

Healthcare.gov: What went wrong?

The user account creation portion of the website was to blame for the problems, and it collapsed under a heavy traffic load from millions of people trying to sign up for health insurance plans, Todd Park, United States chief technology officer (CTO),  told the New York Times the week after the failure.