Hackers could be to blame for the overwhelming Internet user traffic disrupting New York’s Obamacare healthcare exchange.
The New York Post attributed the “abnormally high traffic” the New York State of Health Obamacare Web site received on Tuesday — approximately 10 million visitors — to a possible cyber attack against the website.
“The NY State of Health site recorded an astounding 10 million visits after opening for business Tuesday — although there are only about 1.1 million state residents without health insurance and just 330,000 are expected to buy ObamaCare for next year,” said the publication. “By comparison, the federal government’s heavily promoted HealthCare.gov site — a portal to the sites for all 50 states, the District of Columbia and America’s territories and commonwealths — drew just 4.7 million visitors the first day.”
Whether the 10 million visitors are unique visitors or simply repeat visits by multiple users is unclear. A representative from the New York state government did not return The Daily Caller’s request for comment by the time of publication.
New York State of Health Executive Director Donna Frescatore said on Tuesday that technicians were looking into the reasons for the high traffic.
Several security experts suspected that the overwhelming volume of traffic might be attributable to a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks.
DDoS attacks happen when a hacker or hackers site’s servers overwhelm a website with a concentrated volume of Internet traffic. The attackers will also enlist a network of hijacked computers, called “bot nets,” to aide in the assault.
The attack generally renders a site inaccessible, crashing it in the process.