The 1922 COVID-19 vaccine registration website developed by the Ministry of Health and Welfare (MOHW) went live today, only to suffer a massive crash with widespread 404 and 525 errors on its very first day, triggering public discontent.
Simply put, the digital team once again overlooked proper traffic distribution. Furthermore, mixing millions of users expressing vaccination intent with millions booking specific times and locations simultaneously on day one effectively subjected the server to a nation-scale self-inflicted DDoS attack.
It is not an insurmountable issue, as keeping citizens busy can temporarily distract public attention anyway.
Factually, I propose a simple solution to resolve website crashes for COVID-19 vaccine registration systems, which the government could implement immediately to defuse complaints:
First, divide access by gender: men register on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; women on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays; and on Sundays, everyone rests alongside the servers.
Second, combine the last digit of the ID card with traditional two-hour time slots (the 12 earthly branches): digit 0 registers during Zi hour (23:00-01:00), Chou and Yin hours are reserved for maintenance or open access, digit 1 during Mao hour (05:00-07:00), digit 2 during Chen, 3 Si, 4 Wu, 5 Wei, 6 Shen, 7 You, 8 Xu, and 9 Hai. This achieves complete manual traffic distribution.
