Society

Japan's vaccine booking system crashes

May 12 (canberratimes.com.au) - Technical problems have derailed Japan's coronavirus vaccination booking system, compounding frustration over the government's handling of new outbreaks of infections and an inoculation drive critics say is woefully slow.

The online system to book a vaccine crashed in many places including parts of Tokyo and the western city of Minoh because of a global problem with US cloud computing vendor Salesforce.com Inc, public broadcaster NHK reported.

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

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 per cent 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.

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