Today, Richard Onizuka, CEO for the Washington Health Benefit Exchange, issued the following statement:

“This week, Washington Healthplanfinder customers experienced intermittent slowness and even brief outages as they attempted to complete applications online. To address these issues as quickly as possible, we have brought the site down so that we may better trouble-shoot and conduct necessary maintenance.

Over the past several days, Exchange IT staff have implemented a number of fixes to improve Washington Healthplanfinder’s performance. This included updates to our database, web servers, and a thorough investigation into several modifications made during recent planned weekend maintenance.

We anticipate that Washington Healthplanfinder will see improved performance once back up and running. This includes smoother application flow and a speedier enrollment process.

While the site has not been available to the public, the maintenance environment has provided us the opportunity to process thousands of paper applications and those previously affected by error codes. It’s our intent to process as many of these applications as possible while we are in maintenance mode.

Thank you to everyone for their patience as our staff actively works on these issues. We remain committed to providing our customers with a smooth online experience and apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused.

Our customers may also visit a community organization or registered insurance broker to complete a paper application, as well as contact our toll-free Customer Support Center at 1-855-WAFINDER for general questions.  Residents may enroll by Dec. 23, 2013 for coverage that begins on Jan. 1, 2014, but we look forward to working with residents through March 31, 2014 to enroll them in quality health coverage through Washington Healthplanfinder.”