Japan’s Coronavirus Vaccine Online Booking System Crashes

The online system to book vaccine has crashed on Wednesday, because of a global problem with US cloud computing vendor Salesforce.com Inc, compounding frustration over the government’s handling of new outbreaks of infections and an inoculation drive that critics say has been woefully slow.

Salesforce chief technology officer, Parker Harris said that the company was experiencing a “major disruption”, later updating to say services had been mostly restored.

A representative of the health ministry’s vaccine office was not immediately available when contacted as the ministry has faced numerous technical problems throughout the pandemic, from a contact tracing application that failed to pass on vital information to a cumbersome database that health workers were reluctant to use.

Japan has only inoculated 2.8 percent of its population, the lowest rate among wealthy countries despite an ambitious government target of giving shots to its 36 million elderly people by July, when the Olympics Games are due to open in Tokyo.

The campaign was initially slow because of tight supplies of imported doses of Pfizer Inc’s vaccine but has since been plagued by a shortage of manpower and other logistical snags.

Taro Kono, the minister in charge of vaccines, has urged the public to be patient and to take steps to streamline the booking process.