The head of New York state’s newly launched health insurance exchange said Tuesday that her agency is looking into the cause of surprisingly high web traffic to the exchange’s website.
“Since its launch, nystateofhealth.ny.gov has gotten approximately 10 million web visits, far more than was anticipated, causing login problems for users,” Donna Frescatore, executive director of NY State of Health, said in a statement. “In response to these issues, operators at the state’s call center have assisted thousands of callers while our technicians have increased the site’s capacity and are looking into the cause of this abnormally high traffic.”
According to Frescatore, more than 9,000 New York business owners and individuals were able to use the website to shop for health insurance on Tuesday. Frescatore did not elaborate about what the cause of the high traffic may have been.
Earlier in the day, NY State of Health had posted a statement on its website, saying that “[d]ue to overwhelming interest in the NY State of Health – including 2 million visits in the first 2 hours of the site launch – the health exchange is currently having log in issues.”
For comparison, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services earlier in the day announced that 2.8 million people had visited the website of the federal health insurance marketplace between midnight and Tuesday afternoon. The federal website also experienced glitches.
