Third 'Outage' During Pre-Reservation... Authorities Say "6 Million People Accessed Simultaneously, Alternative Routes Also Being Addressed" (Update)

15 Million 53-54 Year-Old Vaccination Targets, 6 Million Simultaneous Access... Authorities "Analyzing Cause"

[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Ji-hee] Immediately after the COVID-19 vaccine pre-registration began, access issues on the reservation website have not been resolved, and it was revealed that the number of people waiting for the 53-54 age group reservation conducted the previous day reached 6 million. The reservation website can handle about 300,000 simultaneous connections, but the number of users surged to 20 times that amount. Considering that the target population for the 53-54 age group is about 1.5 million, this is about four times the total number of eligible individuals.

The pre-registration for the 53-54 age group, which started at 8 PM on the 19th, experienced access disruptions due to a concentration of reservations. As the 'blackout situation' continued, authorities suspended reservations for about two hours until 10 PM to stabilize the servers. However, even after reservations resumed at 10 PM, long waiting times persisted as many users rushed to book quickly.

Jung Woo-jin, head of the COVID-19 Vaccination Response Task Force System Management Team, explained at the COVID-19 regular briefing on the 20th, "Over the past weekend, we sought ways to disperse initial access as much as possible, and to this end, we transferred part of the reservation function to cloud servers around noon the previous day. However, immediately after the 8 PM start, the number of users far exceeded expectations, causing a deadlock on the four cloud servers planned for operation."

He continued, "To respond to this issue, the system was suspended until 10 PM, and the number of servers was increased from four to ten. After the initial surge of users subsided somewhat, we confirmed that reservations proceeded more smoothly."

This 'blackout situation' on the reservation site occurred for the third time the previous day. According to the task force, the number of people waiting for reservations was 1 to 1.2 million on the 12th when a similar issue was first identified, about 3 to 3.2 million on the 14th, and surged to as many as 6 million the previous day.

The problem did not end there. Even after the access issues were resolved, waiting times exceeding one hour were unavoidable. During this process, an online workaround was shared that allowed users to bypass the queue and move directly to the reservation page by entering specific keywords.

Team leader Jung stated, "We believe that reservations were made normally as before. However, we are actively identifying and addressing the methods being shared on social media." The workaround using 'airplane mode' has already been addressed. He emphasized, "In cooperation with the multi-access control agency, we are analyzing the types of cases that accessed through bypass routes and preparing to reflect measures during the opening at 8 PM today."

Additionally, regarding the confusion caused by a 'coding error' during the early morning hours, he apologized, saying, "Since the schedule and methods for eligible registrants change slightly each time the reservation opens, we regret that we could not thoroughly verify the system codes."

Regarding proposals to accept reservations through private platforms, he said, "Even if reservations were accepted through Naver or Kakao, fundamentally, the server access load problem would not be resolved. Due to privacy protection and tight pre-registration schedules, requesting development from other companies would take time, so it is not being considered."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.