With vaccinations for all Massachusetts residents 65 years and older and those with two or more medical conditions, the number of people eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine is rising by the millions. The traffic is now weakening clinics, pharmacies and websites while jockeying for appointments.
When a million more people were eligible to receive the vaccine on Thursday morning, the state’s website crashed.
Instead of displaying clinics, mass vaccination works and pharmacies with available appointments, the site displayed a confused headline.
As more people click on appointment vaccination sites, the traffic has put a heavy strain on servers, said Olivia Adams, a software engineer who built a website that compiled available vaccine appointments at clinics across the state.
‘It’s a kind of hearing from a university course, at least for me. Everyone would wake up at 6am and start refreshing their tabs and then, you know, post how they all dropped the site, ‘Adams said in an interview last week. “So I hope we do not have that scenario.”
But on Thursday morning it became clear that vaccine sites were already under pressure and that they had to crash as new appointments were added.
Composite issues The state’s 2-1-1 vaccine appointment support line also failed to connect residents with its call center on Thursday morning, and some people said the phone line simply dropped out. Apart from the website of the state’s vaccine seeker, another critical website looking for the vaccine to make appointments at mass vaccination centers such as Gillette Stadium and Fenway Park also declined Thursday morning. CIC Health manages the mass vaccination sites, and its site is fast and responsive. However, when people tried to navigate from CIC Health’s page to the state’s page to make their appointment, the connection stopped.
Dozens of people who were stopped by the state’s flawed web pages expressed WBUR frustration through an online survey form.
“The site continues to crash (with the ‘Bad Gateway’ bug or ‘This Application Crashed’),” writes James Kamitses, 74, of Wellesley in response at 8:40 p.m. Tell the managers of the MA COVID website about the queuing system that the MFA recently used when they opened their online booking system for visits in March. My wait was an hour, but it was orderly and worked well. The same system was used when I got tickets for a Hamilton performance. is NOT ROCKET SCIENCE. I am amazed at how unprepared the MA website was! “
Adams recalled when some state-sponsored vaccination sites added public appointments last week, people rushed to claim it. The increasing traffic made it difficult for some people to access the online sign-up forms, and Adams’ co-sponsor was also unable to remove the latest appointment information from the pages.
‘Everyone shut down that website at 9:00. “When I tried to scrape the data every five minutes, the timing was because it was just too long,” she said last week. ‘To his credit, the Massachusetts website did not go down for a while. It was just slow. ”
On Thursday morning, Adams said: ‘It is clear that [the crashes today are] worse because we are opening the floodgates for a larger demographic and global. ”
As the rollout of vaccines includes larger and younger populations that are more Internet-savvy, Adams is concerned that the slowdown could occur with greater frequency and intensity if current web infrastructure does not expand and certain weaknesses are not addressed.
Adams created MACovidVaccines.com to make it easier for people to find appointments, but said her site can also help drive traffic by quickly indicating which sites are available. This way, people do not constantly load and reload dozens of pages to find a slot.
“It’s not surprising,” she said Thursday. Her website went on all morning without interruption. “It’s frustrating that our site is resilient enough to handle traffic, but official sites are not.”
Although the Department of Public Health has not responded to requests for comment on whether or how it will approach upgrades to its servers or websites, the state has earlier launched a similar website to help people close appointments to find them. said they are working to improve the web experience for vaccine seekers.
Neither Adams nor the state’s website can show information about appointments of one of the hundreds of vaccines in Massachusetts. Many clinics and pharmacies have their own websites, and some systems, such as Walgreens, require users to log in first. Other systems require users to fill out various forms before they are available for appointment. Information collectors like Adams’ website, which scrapes data from other websites, do not always have access to information when it is behind so many obstacles.
Consequently, Adams’ website contains only a few vaccination clinics, many of which are mass vaccination sites, and the state website does not have information for many clinics.
Fortunately, Adams said there is an easy solution – if everyone gets on board. This is called an API. In essence, this system enables websites to send raw data to developers who request it. This will help both her website and the state’s vaccine search website, she said.
But each clinic, pharmacy or vaccination site with its own website must implement its own API. Everyone also needs to find their own way to scale to meet larger traffic requirements, either by upgrading to web hosting services from companies like Amazon or Google, or purchasing upgrades from current hosting services.
CIC Health said earlier this week it was ready for an influx of web traffic. Rodrigo Martinez, head of marketing and experience, said the company is well prepared. CIC Health also made appointment information easily visible to developers, but Martinez said APIs are a good idea.
“Everything we can do to make it easier, we need to investigate, whether it’s us or the state,” he said.
For smaller vaccine providers, including community health clinics, that operate their own websites, more may be required. Dr. Sheena Sharma has a clinic in Webster that uses its own software to manage appointments. Although APIs are not difficult to implement, she is concerned that they could cause security issues that hackers could exploit.
“When you open things up, you have to be careful about what you let in,” she said.
Her clinic has already been the target of malicious web attacks and has spent thousands of dollars over the past week cracking it down and boosting Internet security. A system is needed to centralize information on the appointment of vaccines in the state, Sharma said.
Tell us about your experience with registering for a vaccine appointment with this form: