Improvement of Vaccination Reservation System for Ages 18-49... Processing up to 2 Million People per Hour

[Asia Economy Reporter Seo So-jung] To prevent access failures during the COVID-19 vaccination pre-registration for the 18-49 age group starting on the 9th, the government is forming a public-private joint task force (TF) and improving system performance. The plan is to significantly increase the processing capacity to 2 million cases per hour and ensure smooth reservations through measures such as a 10-day rotation system, blocking bypass access, and diversifying authentication methods.

The COVID-19 Vaccination Response Promotion Team announced on the 5th that it will prepare to faithfully implement the August vaccination plan by significantly improving the pre-registration system through public-private cooperation.

The COVID-19 vaccination pre-registration system has been operating since April this year, handling reservations for 7.32 million people aged 60-74 and 6.17 million people aged 50-59. However, recently, when people in their 50s tried to make reservations, a large number of users accessed the system simultaneously, causing delays and functional errors. Additionally, unfair reservation methods such as bypass access were shared, causing dissatisfaction among eligible registrants.

To resolve this, the government formed a joint TF including relevant ministries and private sector experts. The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) and the Ministry of the Interior and Safety are responsible for system inspection and functional improvements, while the Ministry of Science and ICT led the migration of authentication to the cloud.

By migrating the authentication function, which is the biggest overload factor during system access, to a private cloud and introducing a simple authentication system, access has been smoothed. Server expansion, redistribution, and database (DB) optimization have increased reservation processing capacity from 300,000 cases per hour to over 1 million cases per hour.

To prevent various errors, a private expert inspection team was deployed, and simulated hacking by the National Intelligence Service and Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA) minimized concerns about issues such as bypass access.

In addition to system improvements, the pre-registration procedure for the 18-49 age group will be improved to prevent access congestion and overload. A 10-day rotation system based on birth dates will be introduced to distribute registrants to fewer than 1.9 million per day. The vaccination target population under 40, including foreigners, is approximately 16.21 million.

Authentication methods will also be diversified. Previously, only mobile phone authentication, i-PIN, and joint/financial certificates were available for identity verification, but simple authentication will be added to distribute the load. Access via simple certificates is faster than mobile phone authentication, so obtaining them in advance through Kakao, Naver, PASS app, etc., allows relatively faster reservations.

Moreover, congestion status for each authentication method will be displayed using a traffic light system, enabling users to choose less congested methods at a glance. To prevent excessive waiting, proxy reservations are not allowed, and to reduce load from simultaneous access on multiple devices by one person, authentication will be limited to once every 10 minutes.

The Promotion Team explained that most performance improvements, except for the introduction of simple authentication and migration to the private cloud, have already been completed and applied to the autonomous vaccination pre-registration by local governments on August 3-4. As a result, on the 3rd, average access was smooth without waiting after 5 minutes, and about 280,000 people completed reservations within one hour.

The government plans to complete the expansion of authentication methods and migration to the private cloud by the 9th, expecting the maximum processing capacity to increase to about 2 million cases per hour. Accordingly, the maximum waiting time for pre-registration for the 18-49 age group will be reduced to about 30-50 minutes even if all registrants access simultaneously on the same day.

Na Sung-woong, Deputy Director of the KDCA (Deputy Head of the Promotion Team), said, "We apologize to the public for the inconvenience caused by access failures and errors in the COVID-19 vaccination pre-registration system. Since the reservation time for the 18-49 age group is sufficient throughout the day, we ask that you avoid the start time of pre-registration and access the system with ample time."