Today (October 1st, 2013) was a day when you could not go anywhere without hearing or seeing the words “Government Shutdown.” It was unavoidable. It was also the day that the Affordable Care Act (ACA, commonly known as “Obamacare”) opened for public enrollment. According to Reuters, the purposes of Obamacare are “to bring health insurance to more than 30 million previously uninsured Americans and to slow down soaring medical costs.”

With the popularity of Obamacare, and the amount of people that attempted to sign up earlier in the day, many Obamacare registration sites could not handle the traffic. For instance, New York has a large population, and many New York residents interested in registering for Obamacare could not do so, because the New York State of Health website displayed the following message to its viewers:

“Due 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. We encourage users who are unable to log in to come back to the site later when these issues will be resolved.”

New York’s State of Health Website was not the only website to feel the effects of heavy traffic today. According to CBS News, the main Affordable Care Act website experienced turbulent traffic today with approximately more than one million viewers by 7 a.m. President Barack Obama stated the following remark regarding the site’s traffic statistics.

“That gives you a sense of how important this is to millions of Americans around the country, and that’s a good thing. We’re going to be speeding things up in the next few hours to handle all of this demand that exceeds anything that we had expected.”

Many other states encountered traffic issues with their independent Obamacare registration websites. This was rather embarrassing for well-known news broadcasting station MSNBC as they attempted to demonstrate the registration process online, but unexpectedly failed as shown below (Source: Weazelzippers).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wCwXew9yG

Various registrants who encountered issues with the websites in their states have expressed their frustration on Twitter:

I'm tryna sign up for obamacare but the site is giving me issues..

— melinda sordino (@airicuh_) October 2, 2013

Has anyone in Virginia been able to access obamacare site today?

— TBurling (@VaBeachHomeBiz) October 2, 2013

@BarackObama Dear Prez, the Obamacare site does not have just a couple of glitches, it is PROFOUNDLY BROKEN. PLZ get them to fix it!

— Kathleen Powell (@KathleenLPowell) October 2, 2013

Decided to try the #Obamacare Exchange. Logged onto the site at 6:04pm. As of 10:47 I'm still "waiting on line." Experiment 1: failure #tcot

— Ben LeJeune (@theRightist) October 2, 2013

[Image source: Screen shot of New York State of Health website taken by Chad Sweely 10/01/13 at 9:45p EST.]