Updated — 1 p.m. ET, March 31:
The Obamacare insurance exchange site HealthCare.gov suffered a second major outage Monday, the last day to sign up for insurance mandated under the Affordable Care Act for 2014.
Health and Human Services spokesman Aaron Albright told the Associated Press a technical issue was affecting visitors trying to create new accounts on the site. He said more than 100,000 people were attempting to use the system at the same time.
The latest issue comes after an outage earlier Monday took the site down for several hours.
Early Monday morning, if you were one of the millions attempting to meet the March 31 deadline for Obamacare, this is the screen that appeared on HealthCare.gov when you attempted to sign up for insurance through the federal exchange:
The Department of Health and Human Service released a statement acknowledging the problem, saying "the tech team is working now to bring the system online as soon as possible."
HHS said they hoped to have the site back up and running later in the morning, which now appears to be the case. Midnight ET on March 31 is the deadline for individuals to sign up online, although — due to the frequent technical problems with HealthCare.gov — the deadline has been extended to April 7 for people to file paper applications. Those who were able to at least get in a "queue" online were also exempted from the deadline.
The screen for the federal exchange was later updated to ask potential enrollees to wait:
On a related note, the countdown clock for today's enrollment deadline on the official White House site appeared to be a bit...off.
The White House worked quickly to resolve the countdown clock issue after it helped fuel Obamacare derision on Twitter Monday morning. "Being fixed now," a White House official told BuzzFeed in a hastily written email.
The countdown clock was briefly replaced with minimum wage messaging. After a short while it was reposted with the numbers in the correct slots.
The fixed clock:
