With vaccines available to all Massachusetts residents age 65 and older and those with two or more qualifying medical conditions, the number of people eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine rises to millions. Now, traffic is filling the websites of clinics, pharmacies and states as they vie for appointments.
On Thursday morning, when a million more people became eligible to receive the vaccine, the state’s website went down.
Instead of showing clinics, mass vaccination sites, and pharmacies with available hours, the site featured a confused cephalopod.
As more people click on vaccine booking sites, traffic creates a heavy load on servers, explained Olivia Adams, a software engineer who built a website that aggregates vaccine queries available at clinics across the state.
“It kind of reminds me of enrolling in a college course, at least for me. Everyone would wake up at 6 am and start updating their tabs and then, you know, post about how they all took down the site, ”said Adams in an interview last week. “So, I hope we don’t have that scenario.”
But Thursday morning made it clear that vaccine sites were already suffering from pressure and falling as new appointments were added.
To make matters worse, the state’s 2-1-1 vaccine appointment support line also failed on Thursday morning to connect residents with its call center, with some people saying the line simply hung up. In addition to the state’s vaccine location website, another critical state website that vaccine seekers need to actually book appointments at mass vaccination sites like Gillette Stadium and Fenway Park was also published on Thursday morning. CIC Health runs these mass vaccination sites and its site remains fast and responsive. However, when people tried to navigate from the CIC Health page to the state page to make an appointment, the connection stopped.
Dozens of people frustrated by the failure of the state’s web pages expressed frustration to the WBUR through an online survey form.
“The site keeps crashing (either with ‘Bad Gateway’ or ‘This app crashed’),” wrote James Kamitses, 74, of Wellesley, in response at 8:40 am. “Inform the MA COVID site administrators about the queuing system that MFA used recently when it opened its online reservation system for visits in March. My wait was an hour, but it was ordered and worked well. The same system was used when I got tickets to a Hamilton performance. This is NOT ROCKET SCIENCE. I’m surprised at how unprepared the MA website is! “
Adams recalled that when some state-sponsored vaccine sites added open appointments last week, people were rushing to claim them. The increase in traffic made it difficult for some to access online application forms, and Adams’ aggregator was also unable to extract the most recent appointment information from the pages.
“Everyone was closing that site at 9 am. When I tried to extract this data every five minutes, things were wasting time because it was taking too long, ”she said last week. “To your credit, the Massachusetts website has not gone down and passed out for a while. It was just slow. “
On Thursday morning, Adams said, “Obviously, [the crashes today are] worse, since we are opening the floodgates to a larger demographic group and across the state. “
As the vaccine launch includes larger and younger populations who understand the Internet, Adams fears that this slowdown could occur more frequently and intensely if the current web infrastructure does not increase and certain weaknesses are not addressed.
Adams created MACovidVaccines.com to make it easier for people to find appointments, but said his website can also help manage traffic by quickly showing which sites are available. That way, she said, people are not constantly loading and reloading dozens of pages trying to find a slot.
“This is not surprising,” she said on Thursday. His website ran smoothly throughout the morning. “It is frustrating that our website is resilient enough to handle traffic, but official websites are not.”
Although the Department of Public Health did not respond to requests for comment on this story about whether or how it will address updates to its servers or websites, the state previously launched a similar website designed to help people find queries close to them, and State officials have said they are working to improve the web experience for vaccine seekers.
Neither Adams’ nor the state’s page can show appointment information for each of the hundreds of Massachusetts vaccination sites. Many clinics and pharmacies have their own websites, and some systems, like Walgreens, require users to log in first. Other systems require users to complete multiple forms before viewing the availability of appointments. Information aggregators like the Adams website, which collects data from other sites, cannot always access information when they are behind so many barriers.
As a result, Adams’ website lists only a few vaccination clinics, many of which are mass vaccination sites, and the state’s website lacks information about many clinics.
Fortunately, Adams said there is an easy solution – if everyone agrees. It’s called an API. Essentially, this system allows websites to send raw data to developers who request it. This would help her website and the state’s vaccine location website, she said.
But each clinic, pharmacy or individual vaccination site with its own website would have to implement its own API. Each would also have to find their own way to scale to meet the highest traffic demands, whether upgrading to web hosting services from companies like Amazon or Google or buying upgrades from current hosting services.
CIC Health said earlier this week that it was ready for an influx of web traffic. Rodrigo Martinez, director of marketing and experience, said the company was well prepared. CIC Health has also made naming information easily visible to developers, but Martinez said APIs are a good idea.
“Whatever we can do to make things easier, we should look at it – whether it’s us or the state,” he said.
For smaller vaccine providers, including community health clinics, which have their own websites, it may be more of a question. Dr. Sheena Sharma runs a clinic in Webster that uses her own software to manage consultations. Although APIs are not difficult to implement, she feared that this could create security vulnerabilities that hackers could exploit.
“If you open things up, you better be careful what you let in,” she said.
His clinic has been the target of malicious web attacks and has spent thousands of dollars in the past week to defeat them and strengthen security on the web. A system is needed to centralize vaccine appointment information in the state, Sharma said.
Tell us about your experience when signing up for a vaccine appointment with this form: