HealthCare.gov Data Center Crashes

Republicans said Sunday they intend to press Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on the Obama administration’s troubled launch of healthcare.gov, the online portal to buy insurance — even as the website suffered yet another setback.

A component of the online system that has been working relatively well experienced an outage Sunday. The federal data services hub, a conduit for verifying the personal information of people applying for benefits under the law, went down in a failure that was blamed on an outside contractor, Terremark.

“Today, Terremark had a network failure that is impacting a number of their clients, including healthcare.gov,” HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters said. “Secretary Sebelius spoke with the CEO of Verizon this afternoon to discuss the situation and they committed to fixing the problem as soon as possible.”

Jeffrey Nelson, a spokesman for Verizon Enterprise Solutions, of which Terremark is a part, said: “Our engineers have been working with HHS and other technology companies to identify and address the root cause of the issue. It will fixed as quickly as possible.”