CoWIN portal for Covid-19 vaccine registration faces snag from first hour

“I tried for 30 minutes to get an OTP and even then I was unable to login,” said Jaswanth, a city-based entrepreneur.

Hyderabad: Right after the CoWIN vaccination portal was opened for people above the age of 18 at 4 pm on Wednesday, the server hit a glitch and the portal crashed leaving people frustrated for quite a while.

Earlier, the website was open for registering people above the age of 45 but on Wednesday, it was thrown open for people above 18 years as well. Social media, right from WhatsApp groups to Facebook and Twitter, was abuzz with government agencies reminding people to register the minute the portal opened up, but it was a letdown. Complaints flooded social media as people posted their experiences.

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The self-registration process, which involves registering either through the Arogya Setu or Umang apps, or directly by entering one’s mobile number and getting a one-time-password (OTP), crashed at the OTP stage or with people not receiving the OTPs.

“I tried for 30 minutes to get an OTP but even then, I was unable to login,” said Jaswanth, a city-based entrepreneur. For Rajeev, another youngster from the city, it took 10 attempts to get an OTP and successfully finish the registration process.

Several people were frustrated, with repeated attempts to the register. “I got the OTP around two minutes after I requested but before that could be done, the website said ‘endpoint request timed out’ and the same happened several times,” said Mani, another city-based IT professional.

After repeated efforts as well, the OTP wasn’t received by many and even in the cases where the OTP was received, the text box to enter the OTP didn’t seem to work. On the Arogya Setu app meanwhile, many got the message saying the ‘CoWIN server was facing issues’, asking them to try again later.

Though Arogya Setu’s official Twitter account posted at 4.30 pm saying the portal was working and that ‘a minor glitch’ was fixed, at around 5 pm it was still the same, with users either not receiving the OTP or with the portal saying the OTP is invalid, as the OTP was received after the maximum time period of 180 seconds.

However, later in the evening, these glitches were resolved and the self-registration process worked. Even then, many who managed to get past the registration hurdle then had to throw up their arms when the portal told them slots were unavailable as of now.

The situation, interestingly, threw up quite a few trends on Twitter, ranging from #WaitingForOTP, #OTP and #Slots to #NoOTP and #VaccineRegistration apart from some memes too, including one congratulating the notoriously slow IRCTC app on getting company in the form of the CoWIN portal.

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