Registration for the third phase of Covid vaccination for everyone above 18 years started from 4 p.m. Wednesday. This was after the Union Government announced that everyone above the age of 18 will be eligible to get a vaccine against Covid-19 from May 1. Making the registrations mandatory for any one aged between 18-44 years before getting the jab, the CoWIN registration website was overwhelmed with requests.
"Only self registration and advance appointments for people between 18 to 45 years of age. No walk in allowed," the government had said, but little did citizens know that their attempts to register for the jab on the only vaccine registration website will be of no avail.
CoWIN site went down soon after 4 p.m. on Wednesday and netizens took to social media to express their disappointment. Many users complained on Twitter that trying to register on the website returned the error: "CoWIN server is facing issues. Please try later."
One user who still managed to get past the errors to tactfully get registered on CoWIN said he was not able to get an appointment in Delhi. The user said, there were no appointments available for any centre, government or private, in any district in Delhi as all of the slots were reserved for 45+.
We found similar complaints from users who were able to register themselves but getting a booking was not possible. It was only a matter of time before memes started, and netizens started trolling the center for the failure of CoWIN.
A minor glitch
Taking note of the complaints and the server overload, Aarogya Setu, the government's app for contact tracing, responded at 4:20 p.m. that the issue had been fixed and urged 18+ citizens to register. But without appointments for vaccines, people's frustration is only growing.
