As a long time software developer, I've got a really good feeling about this "extended maintenance" tonight. This is what the small blurb from Reuters says:
The glitch-ridden website used to sign up for insurance under President Barack Obama's healthcare law will be down for "extended maintenance" overnight on Saturday...
The application, enrollment tools, and "data hub" will not be available from about 9 p.m. ET on Saturday (0100 Sunday GMT) until 9 a.m. ET (1400 GMT) on Sunday,...
"The HealthCare.gov tech team is performing extended maintenance this weekend to improve network infrastructure and make enhancements to the online application and enrollment tools," said Joanne Peters, the spokeswoman.
Below the fold for some speculation as to why this could be very good news.
Ok, we know the software on the site is a mess, and they've had these "maintenance" periods before. From a CNBC story on Oct 18, they described the maintenance like this:
Federal officials on Friday told CNBC.com that the application section of HealthCare.gov continues to be "periodically" taken down from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. "for maintenance."
I believe those "periodic" maintenance periods were acts of desperation to try and just keep the entire mess from crashing and burning. But we haven't heard much about these periodic maintenance periods since the tech surge began. In fact, we haven't heard much about any major improvements for awhile.
So they've been doing "live testing" for a month now, they've thrown some quick patches on the things that threatened to bring the whole system down, and they've had time to identify most of the major problems that need to be fixed.
My guess is, they've been coding some major bug fixes and have Jerry-rigged a test platform that they could do some preliminary testing on. And now they've scheduled 12 hours to put some major fixes into production and do some testing on the production environment. If any of the fixes still have major problems, they'll have time to pull them out, and if they think they just have minor problems, they've got tomorrow (low visitations) to try and get them fixed.
I of course have no inside information and I'm just speculating, from a software developers point of view, about a curious series of "maintenance" events. But if they really are putting in some major bug fixes to HealthCare.gov tonight, it's going to be a really different political world on Monday.
The Republicans and the media, especially with that story of only 248 people signing up in the first 2 days, have left the public with the impression that the entire ACA is completely broken. So if these fixes are as big as I think they might be, Monday may bring a rash of news stories of thousands of people getting all the way through the system, or at least to the point of actually being able to purchase a plan. And all those reporters (Ezra Klein!) will have to report a significant improvement in the website, and all those Republicans will have to make up entirely new stories about ACA failures.
I'm normally a pretty pessimistic person, but I've got a really good feeling about this "extended maintenance" tonight. So if this turns out to be as big of a fix as I'm hoping, let's get ready to pump up all the success stories that I think we'll be seeing in the next few days.