AUSTIN (KXAN) — Austin Public Health plans to reopen its online COVID-19 vaccine sign-up portal Thursday evening. This comes after the latest bout of technical issues.
APH officials say they’ve been testing new code following Monday’s portal malfunction that caused a backlog of people trying to sign up for appointments. Eventually APH shut the portal down completely.
APH doesn’t know who was in the queue Monday waiting for an appointment, so people are going to have to sign on Thursday evening and try again. APH says a third party manages the queue and it doesn’t store information.
When the site crashed Monday, 9,000 people were waiting to book approximately 6,000 appointments. The portal opened at 6 p.m. About an hour later, APH said the site was “experiencing some technical issues,” and then just before midnight, the agency shut it down.
“We understand this is frustrating and we are working to proactively schedule those who had made it past the waiting room and were unable to confirm their appointments due to technical issues,” APH said in a tweet Tuesday. “We are also continuing to schedule through the Health Equity Line.”
Since the vaccine rollout began, APH has had plenty of problems with its online sign-up portal. KXAN investigators reported in February that “high simultaneous demand” caused most of the problems that began in January with the website, administered by the company Salesforce. Internal city memos showed officials knew about the issues, saying there were “frustrations within the community,” and they were working with Salesforce to fix the issues.
Simply logging in to the site was an issue for a while in January until the city came up with a solution.
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