Within minutes of its 8 a.m. opening on Wednesday morning, the Alberta system allowing seniors to book for the COVID-19 vaccine had crashed.

By noon, a trio of Edmonton brothers had figured out the problem on the website and posted a solution on Twitter to help others sidestep the glitch.

The issue, according to Kory Mathewson, a research scientist with Google’s DeepMind Technologies, was attached to one of the first steps of the form asking for a postal code.

“When you put in your postal code, it was trying to figure out the closest vaccine location to where your postal code is, but that’s a difficult computing science problem,” Mathewson told CBC Radio’s Edmonton AM on Thursday.

Source: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

Date: February 26th, 2021

Link: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/how-3-brothers-solved-a-tech-glitch-that-was-crashing-alberta-s-covid-19-vaccine-booking-tool-1.5927733

Discussion

1. ” There was a small weak link in the chain ” The entire sign-up system practically ground to a halt because of the “weak link in the chain”. What steps could and should have been taken to make sure there were no weak links?
2. ” He shared the solution — which involved adding some code into the JavaScript developer console — with a friend, who confirmed that it worked. Then they shared it with a few other people, who also were able to book appointments. ” What sort of testing is this? Why do you think the developers of the system didn’t do this sort of testing?