Healthcare.gov struggles to support the Affordable Healthcare Act process

Having a lot of experience with large web-based sites, I have been following the struggles of HealthCare.gov with interest.  HealthCare.gov is the federal site for the Affordable Healthcare Act (nicknamed "Obamacare").  Leading up to October 1, 2013, I feared that the site would encounter severe difficulties.  There was no doubt in my mind that millions of individuals, attempting to access any complex web site, would cause severe problems. 

Think about it:

1. Millions of users, with (at a minimum) tens of thousands of simultaneous users
2. It needs to support numerous languages
3. Because of the wide range of users, it must support web accessibility, referred to as "Section 508". (Section508.gov, Wikipedia, W3C)
4. It must operate as a web application (no matter what the back-end programming language is)
5. It must scale, and scale fast.
6. It must run as lightly as it possibly can, in order to avoid overloading the web servers.

Additionally, security would be crucial:

1. It must run over SSL, for encryption
2. It must store all data securely, probably with extra safe-guards to protect the data from prying eyes.
3. It will certainly be a target of small-scale DoS attacks, since there is a lot of political charge revolving around the concept

The site has been (sort of) operational for a full week, now, and my concerns have certainly been realized.  The HealthCare.gov Home page performs fine, but attempting to get to the application section of the site gives you a message saying "The system is down at the moment." 

I certainly feel for the plight of the development team.  Attempting to improve the performance of a production site can be exceptionally difficult.

CD