HealthCare.gov up again after data system crash

NEW YORK — The website at the center of the U.S. health care overhaul law was back up Monday after a data center outage prevented Americans from enrolling in subsidized health insurance, the latest technical problem to plague the online insurance exchanges.

The outage, which started before dawn Sunday, affected not only the federal government’s online exchange, HealthCare.gov, but also those run by 14 states and the District of Columbia, the Department of Health and Human Services said.

HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters said Monday the website and a data services hubthat determines if people are eligible to buy health insurance on the exchange were both back online as of 7 a.m. Eastern after being restored late Sunday and tested overnight.

The outage was the latest problem in the troubled rollout of the online health insurance exchanges set up by President Barack Obama’s 2010 Affordable Care Act. Since the exchanges’ problemplagued Oct. 1 launch, information technology experts from both the government and private contractors have been scrambling to fix the technical issues that plague the system, with a “tech surge” of additional experts beginning about a week ago.

HealthCare.gov was working on changes to its online account creation when the outage occurred, Peters said in a statement.

Representatives of the Connecticut and New York exchanges said earlier Monday they were able to access the federal data hub again.