HealthCare.gov launched to 250,000 people at once, and six signed up on day one

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250 thousand people on one website. At the same time. By the end of day one, six had signed up.

2013. America's new health insurance website is behind schedule. By August it's clear. It won't be fully tested. Yet no one in leadership seriously discusses a delay. 1 October. Launch. Within 2 hours, outages.

One contractor put it bluntly. You can't test what is not built. The pieces arrived too late to test together. End to end? Never completed.

250 thousand concurrent users. Five times the number expected, said the US Chief Technology Officer. But here's the catch. Traffic wasn't the only problem.

Every visitor had to pass one sign-in system first. Its builders didn't know that. So they underestimated the capacity. A CMS official called it a one-lane onramp to a major highway. And behind it? Bigger coding problems nobody could see yet.

Then the fixing. Early November, the site worked 42 percent of the time. By the end of November, over 90 percent. Enrollment still ended with 5 point 4 million people on a plan.

Testing the pieces is not testing the system. Find the door every user walks through. Size it for all of them.

Full story in the article.