“Last season, we encountered these types of delays around the Dec. 15 and Jan. 31 deadlines, but not this early in the season,” Elizabeth Colvin, director of Insure Central Texas, a group helping people in the Dallas area enroll in plans, tells the Journal. “The delays felt rather constant during the first week.”

And yet, the complications don’t seem to be the result of an unusually high volume of enrollees. Roughly half a million people have tried to sign up through the first four days of the enrollment period, compared to 1.15 million who did in the first week of last year’s sign-up period.

While enrollment workers associated with nonprofits tell the Journal the delays have been “constant” throughout the open enrollment period, federal officials suggest that those accounts are exaggerated and that the waiting rooms were put in place in response to a specific technical glitch that will be fixed in the coming days.

Assurances from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services are likely to be viewed with skepticism by ACA advocates and detractors alike. Although Healthcare.gov has operated relatively smoothly throughout most of its history, the headaches that enrollees encountered when the site was first unveiled three years ago are still fresh in everyone’s memory.

The Obama administration is pulling for a major boost in enrollment, particularly among young people, to improve the marketplace’s actuarial profile. The administration has been aggressively courting young people through online marketing, hoping to get them to sign up for plans and dissuade more insurers from ditching the ACA marketplace.