Minutes after the Central government opened the vaccine registration for those between 18-45 years on the CoWIN portal, the website crashed. Although the error was fixed after sometime, and many were able to register, it is unlikely if anyone could set an appointment as many cities showed barely any available vaccination centres at the time of publishing this story. Even after one could get the portal to work, and able to get vaccination centre data, virtually none of them were accepting appointments for those below 45. Attempts to reach National Health Authority CEO RS Sharma in regards to the matter did not evoke any response. The registration process began at 4.00 pm and by 4.02 pm the website had crashed and showed a '504 - Gateway Time-out' error, presumably because of server overload with millions of people simultaneously trying to log into the portal at the same time. Although the website was restored after a few minutes, bugs in the portal made it a very cumbersome process for those looking to registering themselves. Many people, including MediaNama reporters, did not receive OTPs on time. Even for those who did, it was still not smooth sailing as the website often froze, refusing to proceed to the page where they could enter the number. For the few citizens who were patient enough to wait 40 minutes to finally register themselves and proceed towards scheduling their appointments for vaccination, the system showed barely three or four options for the entire district of Hyderabad.…
