The president's healthcare sign-up web page was supposed to handle tens of thousands of people at once. But in a trial run days before its launch, just a few hundred users flatlined the site.

Despite the problems, federal health officials pushed aside the crash cart and rolled out HealthCare.gov on October 1 as planned,The Washington Post reported.

The result? The website crashed shortly after midnight as a couple thousand people tried to start the process, two people familiar with the project told the Post.

The report is the latest criticism of the problem-plagued site - criticism so acute that even the President said there was " no sugarcoating" the difficulties Americans have faced trying to sign up for insurance coverage.

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