The government announced in a Press Information Bureau (PIB) release that more than 80 lakh citizens had registered for India’s Phase 3 vaccination and that the “Co-WIN digital portal continues to run without any technological glitch on the first day of registration of the extended qualifying population groups.”
On Wednesday, April 28th, the government announced that the portal received 383 million API hits in the first three hours (up to 7 p.m.).
TRAI’s RG Sharma took to twitter to claim
There have been 79,65,720 registrations on Co-WIN today, most of these in the last three hours (16:00-19:00) and mostly of 18-44 age group. We have seen a traffic of 55,000 hits per second. System functioning as expected.”
However, just minutes after registration for India’s Phase 3 vaccination was opened to those aged 18 to 45, several people complained of Co-WIN and Aarogya Setu app servers being down.
On April 28, the government declared that registration for these applications will begin at 4 p.m.
However, some users were unable to register at all, with the applications displaying an error message; others were unable to locate a vaccine centre; and a few others said that the registration age cap was still listed as ‘45+.’
The Aarogya Setu app’s Twitter handle told that the “minor bug” had been patched shortly after some netizens tagged these portals and the health ministry on Twitter. According to government sources cited by NDTV, the CoWIN website receives nearly 27 lakh visits per minute.
“On several days, we have seen about 5 million people registered in a day,” RS Sharma said. Today, we expect the figure to be more than doubled. When registrations open today, we believe our device will be able to handle the load.”
“Some states and hospitals will come on board on May 1 or later, hence, visibility into the bookings/vacancy available for vaccination will be available when states and hospitals come on board,” Sharma said.
Even when the government opened registers for all residents above the age of 18, there was a lot of concern about Phase 3 of vaccination. Just two days before the injection starts on May 1st, several states are yet to collect vaccine doses, potentially delaying the whole operation.
