The House Energy and Commerce Committee made public on Thursday emails sent between HealthCare.gov developers outlining the vast technical problems the website faced in the week leading up to the site's botched rollout.

The emails, between IT officials and developers, including Henry Chao, deputy chief information officer of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and Akhtar Zaman from the CMS Office of Information Services, show that just days before the site's Oct. 1 launch the website was unable to consistently handle 500 users at once in the testing phase.

The House committee has launched an investigation into the botched rollout of HealthCare.gov, where uninsured Americans in 36 states have been directed to sign up for individual health insurance plans in marketplaces run by the federal government.

On Sept. 27, David Nelson, director of the office of enterprise management at CMS, said the system was failing due to problems including defective code.

"We have not been successful in moving beyond 500 concurrent users filling applications" he said. "We must give ourselves the ability to work through these tuning issues."

In an Sept. 26 email, Zaman told developers that over a three-day-period tests with 2,000 virtual users (Vusers) also failed.

"We ran several performance & stress test (PST) cycles (starting from 10 Vuser to 2000 Vuser) since last 3 days but the results are not good and not consistent at all ... Later in the Wednesday evening, we ran two more cycles of testing. We attempted two cycles at 2,000 Vusers. Neither was successful," he wrote.

Chao replied to that message, writing near the bottom, “I DO NOT WANT A REPEAT OF WHAT HAPPENED NEAR THE END OF DECEMBER 2005 WHERE MEDICARE.GOV HAD A MELTDOWN (THIS IS TO GET YOUR ATTENTION IF I DIDN’T HAVE IT ALREADY).”

Chao was referring to the problematic launch of the George W. Bush administration's Medicare prescription-drug program.



The emails, which are partially redacted, set as a goal making the website stable with a minimum load of 10,000 users at a time — although in Chao's Sept. 26 email he notes that they expect 50,000 users to be using the site concurrently.

According to Reuters, however, as many as 250,000 people visited the site on the day it launched.



On Sept. 29, two days before HealthCare.gov launched, Todd Park, the government's chief technology officer, emailed Chao asking what would happen once the website breached the maximum number of users it could handle.

"Is there a gradual degradation of response time for users? Rapid degradation? Immediate crashing?" Park writes. In the next line, he signs off with a positive note: "Massive kudos again for the incredible progress the team is making!"