Obama on HealthCare.gov bugs: Patience, even Apple has issues
Talking about reports of slow load times and bugs, President Obama refers to Apple's experience after the debut of iOS 7.
During his remarks, Obama drew a parallel with Apple's recent release of iOS 7.
"And 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. Consider that just a couple of weeks ago, Apple rolled out a new mobile operating system, and within days, they found a glitch, so they fixed it. I don't remember anybody suggesting Apple should stop selling iPhones or iPads or threatening to shut down the company if they didn't. That's not how we do things in America. We don't actively root for failure. We get to work, we make things happen, we make them better, we keep going."
Earlier in the day, many people attempting to log on were met with the following error message:
"We have a lot of visitors on our site right now, and we're working to make your experience here better. Please wait here until we send you to the log-in page. Thank you for your patience." By early afternoon Pacific, the system appeared to be running smoothly. But federal officials noted that the site faced unique strains with more than 1 million people visiting the site within the last day. That's also five times the number of users on the Medicare.gov Web site at one time, according to the Chicago Tribune.