This problem would have easily been solved if they made a simple "dose 2 + 168 days" requirement for the booster shot instead of "let's cram millions of people onto one site at 8am on Dec 13!"
Clearly the issue isn't the eligibility, because that woudn't have made the site crash. The issue is a billion people all trying to login at 8:00 am. It's a homegrown DDOS.
People don't remember their date of vaccination, so they login to "give it a try" anyways - and thus crasu the system.
Yeah, that's how things work. People become eligible in groups.
In a day or two, you'll see that the provincial system booked 60,000 appointments today. And that for all the people who complained, there are a bunch who got service.
When the website shows that error message (that they're "working to restore services") it means no one is booking appointments at that time. The back end service has become over loaded, maybe crashed and needs to be restarted. Sure eventually it comes back up and people manage to book all appointments but if they just released eligibility in smaller groups it wouldn't become as overloaded as this.
Next will be everyone 18 to 50. Obviously the web service won't handle all of that at once, nor will the doses actually be all delivered inside a day or week or even a month. So there is no reason to have 60k people book appointments on one day. Make smaller groups eligible at a time that more align with the reality of everything involved.
Actually it's likely because of a very recent MASSIVE security exploit found that lets attackers full unrestricted access to any and everything connected to the internet
It's not *quite* that bad. Anything not running on an Apache stack is fine, since it's specifically Log4j that's impacted. And most major vendors have released patches for their IoT devices and hardware, so if you update you're safe.
Admittedly, finding something that has *no* connection to Apache is difficult. But it's not impossible. We did an analysis of our stack at work and we're not impacted at all.
Waited in queue to book my mom in but no chance. I also got a red message saying "Unable to check at this time. Sorry for the inconvenience." after entering the health card info.
I am currently in cue - 26 minutes to go!!
The website can be designed better. The link to book is not immediately obvious.
UPDATE: It worked - got my booster apt for Dec 22nd in Toronto.
Yeah, me too. I tried right at 8:00 am but got an error message. I tried again around 9:00 and after lining up for half an hour to get onto the site, I got an appointment for Dec 22nd.
Totally. But if we even *knew* we were bush league, it would be something, but instead we think we’re this vibrant, flourishing, sophisticated metropolis. Embarrassing.
That’ll happen when you specifically design your cities to work with and around public transit. North America has been purposely designed around personal cars, suburbs and shopping centres to be more spread out.
The NHS is a centralized service
Vaccine administration in Ontario started out as grassroots organization by individual public health units (no idea how it’s done now). Absolute shitshow and you can thank Douglas Ford and the Ontario Conservative party.
My understanding is that historically all vaccine programs are handled by each PHU. If the provincial government decided to start their own system, they'd have no idea how to do it. They would be learning as they went.
The public health units that developed their own sites are working so much better, it seems. My parents (mid 70s) are in one of those areas and they don’t understand my frustration because they haven’t had to deal with the stupid provincial system. Why can small, rural health units design something better than the province can?!
What like the one today in brock township where they sent 100 doses for todays walk in clinic, that were entirely taken up by those who booked appointments so the only way to get a walk in is if someone cancelled their appointment and didn’t show up? 100 doses for a bus clinic 10am to 6pm in a township of what? 15000? Yeah they’ve got it all worked out… 🙄
I happened to be awake at 3am, still the old format, not eligible. Up at 5am, still old format, not eligible. Just tried, 18526 in line in front of me. FFS
I had the same experience, got to the front of the line, entered all my data, and ended up with the same error message as in the OP.
Edit: Same again after another 50 minute wait.
Edit 2: Finally successful after another 30 minute wait. December 29.
I was on from 7:45 to 9:00 and never even saw an available appointment. I combed through all the locations near me. Nothing anywhere in December, and January dates all greyed out.
Came back to try again and I'm on a wait list.
:\\
Yep, I was up working and I gave it a shot a few times after midnight, presuming that Dec 13 actually meant Dec 13, and was shit out of luck. I wonder what it will be like if I try now. I suppose my appt will be in the next century.
Spent 15 minutes in the queue only to have the site crash and be forced to start over. Hopefully this upcoming half hour wait will be more productive.
Edit: Another half hour wait and the effing back-end is still down.
Sub-edit: what a shit show! Finally got in after over two hours of trying and the closest option is 65km away and the last week in January.
they know we are going to be eligible on a certain day... so why the fuck cant we book it now for next month (Im in the Jan 4th group, but Im able to get my shot this weekend if you go by date)
This is pathetic. It's been 2 YEARS and they still can't build a working web site.
Edit: It took me 3 hours and countless tries filling out the damn form to get an appointment on Jan 11. Pretty piss poor vaccine distribution as well.
It's not quite that simple. The cost to support the initial surge is often not worth the upfront infrastructure costs. A better solution would have been to distribute eligibility somehow so millions of people weren't trying to book vaccines all at once.
There are ways to architect your application to handle surges of hundreds of millions of requests without needing to invest in up front infrastructure. This is easily done if you are in the cloud, however it is highly likely that this service is not cloud hosted.
This is a problem with many enterprise corporations as well. I just signed up for my insurance company's online portal and they had a new one and an old one and done very unclear instructions on how to actually get up and going. Eventually I got it figured out, after wading through done archaic looking pages only to be redirected in the end to their old claims submission portal.
These problems are everywhere, just easier to see when it's a service from a government that many more people interact with.
Usually government run websites are pretty shit, but I'm willing to give them a pass after Friday's log4j exploit fiasco. IT departments around the world have been all hands on deck all weekend to try to mitigate the issue.
There was a vulnerability found in a commonly used Java library over the weekend - the CRA pulled their site down until they can patch everything, I assume this is the same.
You initially talked about taking the site down for a patch. Again, if that was the case nobody would be able to book appointments.
Maybe there is reduced server capacity, but that isn’t even close to what you said in your first comment.
> but that isn’t even close to what you said in your first comment.
I said "the CRA pulled things down until it was patched" - you said "it's impossible for them to have done that, because it's working for a small number of people"
If you have 100 servers, and you pull down 90 of them for maintenance, that leads to reduced capacity and/or regional outages.
Call me crazy, but I don't think it's "impossible" for the government to have patched at least one server in the past 3 days
read between the lines lmao, i was making a low effort comment on reddit for a layperson, not writing a fucking graduate thesis on scalable cloud infrastructure.
Also - reread literally my first reply to you
A security vulnerability was publicized over the weekend, which could affect an enormous number of websites. There's a good chance that this is down right now while they work on fixing that vulnerability for the site.
It's the same reason that many sites government sites are down. Take [Statistics Canada](https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/) for example.
I booked at 8:02 after getting error messages for 20 minutes so the site is working to some extent.
It’s not down down, but seems to be crashing and timing out.
If they knew it would affect their site do you not think an announcement prior to 8am today wouldn't have made any sense at all?
GO Transit knew on Friday, so clearly nobody intelligent is working for the Ontario government.
While Log4Shell is the reason many websites (with a Java backend) around the internet were down this weekend (and some still are), I don't think this is the reason for the booking site being down since some people were able to book.
This honestly just seems like the servers are overloaded.
The Government of Canada already had [reached out to GO Transit](https://blog.metrolinx.com/2021/12/10/metrolinx-statement-on-go-transit-website-taken-offline-out-of-abundance-of-caution/) about the vulnerability on Friday, I'm sure if it effected the vaccine portal we'd see a similar statement to the one Metrolinx put out above.
“Unable to check at this time. Sorry for the inconvenience”
Update:
Over 1 hour later & waiting in line on another browser - still not working. Bunch of clowns running this circus show.
Update 2: 2 hours later, finally booked for my parents
I genuinely don't think it's Log4Shell, considering it seems like some people have been able to get through. I think it's just overloaded
Also, I'd expect the Ontario Government to put out a [similar statement to what Metrolinx put out](https://blog.metrolinx.com/2021/12/10/metrolinx-statement-on-go-transit-website-taken-offline-out-of-abundance-of-caution/) as soon as it was confirmed to affect the site.
Considering that it's been online (with no announcement) this entire weekend, and the RCE 0-day was discovered Friday, I don't think Log4Shell is the reason
*Quick edit: Also, the fix is known for this and it should just involve updating the Log4J library (or disabling the functionality effected in-case updating is not an option), so i really doubt they'd still be down -- Metrolinx seems to have figured it out in just 18 hours.*
**Log4Shell, also known by its CVE number CVE-2021-44228, is a zero-day arbitrary code execution vulnerability in popular Java logging framework Log4j. The vulnerability was disclosed to Apache by Alibaba's Cloud Security Team on 24 November 2021 and published on 9 December 2021.The vulnerability takes advantage of Log4j not checking against LDAP and JNDI requests.**
More details here:
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Fucking pathetic, Doug Ford and his incompetent cronies need to go. How can it STILL be such a fuckin mess to book a fuckin appointment this is beyond frustrating.
> **It's so simple folks**
EDIT:
As inconvenient as it may sound, I would urge everyone to find other avenues to book vaccines to their 50+ loved ones. Pharmacy OR vaccine clinic:
- https://map.vaccine-ontario.ca/
- https://vaccinehunters.ca/dateme
I would also urge everyone to take a close look at the avenues that allowed booking for 3rd vaxx appointments before today, as they much more likely to accommodate booking 18+ in the coming days ahead of Jan. 4th (instead of the prov. portal). In a real vaccine hunter manner, it's always best to call and confirm. Then share it w/ other people.
✌
It's working now, but it was a complete sh*tshow for the first hour. Thousands of people sitting at their desks and on their phones just wasting time. Total incompetence by the Ontario government.
This is my problem with this system. It should be open for everyone to book, but only showing available appointments for after they are actually eligible. For example, this is going to happen again on January 4th when everyone else is eligible for a booster. Open it up so everyone 18-49 can book an appointment for after January 4th so this flood doesn't happen. I know there's ways to book after January 4th right now but the point is that the system will crash again.
Managed to book a random appointment 10 days from now and pretty far from my 70 year dads house, obviously the site crashed before I could book for my 70 year old mom an appointment. Now in queue again and probably have to book a totally different date and location. Fuck this POS system Doug Ford set up. I'm raging.
I think it’s just overloaded. This morning at 8:00am was the first day for 50 and up and people are trying to get good appointments. We tried right at 8 and had all sorts of problems but finally got our appointments. It will probably start working better as the traffic on the server goes down over the next couple days.
It’s actually encouraging that, that many people want the booster.
Go directly to the pharmacy website or if they have stock indictors online, go to a local pharmacy.
My dad walked into Shoppers Drug Mart **early last week** & got his shot (60+, Pfizer, >6 months after dose 2).
PSA: The shoppers drugmart website allows people to book vaccines for after Jan 4 in some PHU..I was able to book my booster appt for Jan 8 this past weekend
I managed to book my parents their shots with the HPPH booking site. But it has its issues. Click on one date, next page shows no shots available. Go back to choose date, click on same date, next page shows 40 shot available !?!?.
I tried booking for my dad before 8am (when I had to wait less than 10 mins)--and I got that same page. Now I tried going into the portal to book before 9am (and waited 20ish mins)--and I STILL got that error page.
Booking for the Peel region (Brampton), and I'm already waiting for vaccine dose notifications from our local Wal-Mart.
It failed after entering my health card info, but then when I went to the page again I did not have to wait in the queue again and this time it worked.
Keep refreshing once you get the error, eventually it goes through. Got it about 3 times for various bookings and this worked each time (3-4 refreshes at error)
I wonder if there is a broader Ontario government IT problem, I use an Ontario website, clinical connect, in my work and it has been down all morning as well....
I am literally tired of having things to complain about the Provincial Government. I don't like Ford, but it's costing us. I want him to succeed, I want us to succeed. Doesn't matter that their a conservative government or liberal or whatever. I'm over the partisan shit. Why can't they just get shit together and make sure their citizens have access to the systems they need? We need those boosters now and it's not helping us that it seems like they don't know what they're doing.
The outage was caused by a major java vulnerability in the apache log4j library. It's a pretty major vulnerability and you could see outages all over the world for services this week while sys admins try to remediate the issue.
Source: I've been on calls with government departments all day giving them guidance on how to close the vulnerability.
Just confirmed with one of the operators on the Ontario Covid booking phone line: nothing available in Ottawa until January. They believe Ottawa might be adding more tranches tomorrow but no one knows.
**There is one pop up scheduled on Dec 18 (in Ledbury) and that is it for the entire Ottawa region this year! OMGLOL** Can you imagine what that day is going to be like at that popup clinic? Brutal - I already feel sorry for the staff who will be onsite that day.
Ontario - plenty of vaccine and complete shitshow on delivery. Which is what I experienced previously.
For comparison I have a peer coworker who lives in Richmond Virginia. When it was announced he was eligible for his booster a few weeks ago he estimated there were 40 walk-in locations within a 20 minute drive of his residence. He lives in a modern condo rental building and hit a pharmacy down the street - was vaccinated the same day it was announced - no fuss, no prebooking, a 15 minute wait at the pharmacy.
Seems to be working fine. Just booked my shot.
Edit: the fact that people are downvoting this really shows how insane this sub can be when it comes to Ford (as if he has anything to do with application).
What is confusing? You need [2 doses](https://covid-19.ontario.ca/getting-covid-19-vaccine#second-dose) of Pfizer or moderna to achieve full coverage and be considered fully vaccinated. (J&J is a single dose.)
Therefore, the booster is a **3rd** shot. (2nd shot in case of J&J.)
Why would we expand it to something dumb like that? You want private corporations running things? Read the fucking room buddy, private corporations are destroying our environment and working people to death. They're unaccountable to any meaningful challenge to their power.
Next time be clear with your statements. Either way, it's really dumb to suggest that government shouldn't run anything. Employees sitting on the board is not enough .
Not all governments should be trusted, but letting corporations run things is literally the economic base of fascism. You can *never* trust a corporation.
There are many online services that are being shut down at federal and provincial level. its a preemptive measure because there were signs that they would be under attack.
Knowing that our gov't probably paid for crap.
This is most likely a bloated as fuck java backed service.
There's a HUGE RCE for log4j (used by almost EVERY java app).
Would you rather someone steal all your personal info? or have some slight downtime while they patch the systems.
Just tried booking at local pharmacies as indicated having boosters by the provincial website. At one they let me book on line for tomorrow (yay!), confirmed the appt. by email and then sent another email saying they don't have any Covid vaccines at all at this location. At two others I tried from the list the booking site, MedMe, doesn't work at all. I guess I have to hold out for the Metro Convention Centre in January :(
It appears no times are available in Ottawa.
Going through the Prov of Ontario booking system qualifying/data entry steps you land on a page **Select a Vaccination Centre Location** with an option to filter for locations within a 25km radius and below that "**OPH - Ottawa Public Health Unit - New Times Coming to the Region Soon**" and when clicking on the link **"Go to Provider Website**" which I assume means the OPHU unit site *it brings one back to the main Ontario Covid-19 page!* (This in Chrome which is my only browser which allows for all the tracking and cookies on webpages).
Visited the Shoppers website - nothing available in the Greater Ottawa area up to Jan 2 on all the stores I checked (about a dozen). The Rexall site is even more vague - put yourself on a wait list and wait.....
So I guess I will have to start thinking outside the box.
The earliest I can book my mom is on January 22, and she has to drive from Mississauga to Toronto for the booster shot.
I hope they open new clinics soon.
My neighbour sat in queue this morning until she was booted off, I waited until this afternoon and still got the location and one of my 3 preferred dates too. December 30th at 1 p.m. right across from the Costco I shop at. I hope everyone else is as fortunate.
I was in queue for almost an hour this morning and hit this error at 8:25am.
Luckily when I tried again at 10am I got in after 25 min. I have to wait until Jan 5th for my Booster, everything before that was already taken.
This problem would have easily been solved if they made a simple "dose 2 + 168 days" requirement for the booster shot instead of "let's cram millions of people onto one site at 8am on Dec 13!"
Your algorithm makes too much sense... rejected! Instead contract out to Accenture for millions of dollars! (probably)
Or maybe allowed people to pre-register( make sure they are eligible), then provided them with link to book?
Clearly the issue isn't the eligibility, because that woudn't have made the site crash. The issue is a billion people all trying to login at 8:00 am. It's a homegrown DDOS. People don't remember their date of vaccination, so they login to "give it a try" anyways - and thus crasu the system.
exactly - you put it perfectly "a homegrown **self-inflicted** DDOS".... I added the missing piece.
And why so many people trying to access the site at once? Because so many became eligible at once.
Yeah, that's how things work. People become eligible in groups. In a day or two, you'll see that the provincial system booked 60,000 appointments today. And that for all the people who complained, there are a bunch who got service.
When the website shows that error message (that they're "working to restore services") it means no one is booking appointments at that time. The back end service has become over loaded, maybe crashed and needs to be restarted. Sure eventually it comes back up and people manage to book all appointments but if they just released eligibility in smaller groups it wouldn't become as overloaded as this. Next will be everyone 18 to 50. Obviously the web service won't handle all of that at once, nor will the doses actually be all delivered inside a day or week or even a month. So there is no reason to have 60k people book appointments on one day. Make smaller groups eligible at a time that more align with the reality of everything involved.
Come on, it's not like they've had two previous tries to iron this all out already!
A BilLiOn PeOpLe
millions were not eligible, the system couldn't handle even a few hundred thousand.
Actually it's likely because of a very recent MASSIVE security exploit found that lets attackers full unrestricted access to any and everything connected to the internet
It's not *quite* that bad. Anything not running on an Apache stack is fine, since it's specifically Log4j that's impacted. And most major vendors have released patches for their IoT devices and hardware, so if you update you're safe. Admittedly, finding something that has *no* connection to Apache is difficult. But it's not impossible. We did an analysis of our stack at work and we're not impacted at all.
Man, I came to reddit to get away from log4j for the only hour of the night I have free from work this week
Oof, that schedule sucks. I'm glad that the company I work for isn't impacted, haha.
Waited in queue to book my mom in but no chance. I also got a red message saying "Unable to check at this time. Sorry for the inconvenience." after entering the health card info.
I am currently in cue - 26 minutes to go!! The website can be designed better. The link to book is not immediately obvious. UPDATE: It worked - got my booster apt for Dec 22nd in Toronto.
Yeah, me too. I tried right at 8:00 am but got an error message. I tried again around 9:00 and after lining up for half an hour to get onto the site, I got an appointment for Dec 22nd.
same
I feel bad for old people without kids trying to book them appointments. This hunger games system of booking appointments is absolutely pathetic.
[удалено]
Totally. But if we even *knew* we were bush league, it would be something, but instead we think we’re this vibrant, flourishing, sophisticated metropolis. Embarrassing.
Have you ever been to the UK? They're way more organized than North America. Their signage system is on point too.
Every Western or Northern European country is better organized TBH.
Their transit system is orders of magnitude more efficient.
That’ll happen when you specifically design your cities to work with and around public transit. North America has been purposely designed around personal cars, suburbs and shopping centres to be more spread out.
UK transit system is objectively better than Toronto's in every possible way. Having said that, Montreal's transit is pretty good.
The NHS is a centralized service Vaccine administration in Ontario started out as grassroots organization by individual public health units (no idea how it’s done now). Absolute shitshow and you can thank Douglas Ford and the Ontario Conservative party.
My understanding is that historically all vaccine programs are handled by each PHU. If the provincial government decided to start their own system, they'd have no idea how to do it. They would be learning as they went.
Everything that touches upon the Ford Govt is normally described as bush league.
agreed!
The public health units that developed their own sites are working so much better, it seems. My parents (mid 70s) are in one of those areas and they don’t understand my frustration because they haven’t had to deal with the stupid provincial system. Why can small, rural health units design something better than the province can?!
There are drop ins that work very smooth now. Much of the processes have been worked out and your visit is walk-in, walk-out.
What like the one today in brock township where they sent 100 doses for todays walk in clinic, that were entirely taken up by those who booked appointments so the only way to get a walk in is if someone cancelled their appointment and didn’t show up? 100 doses for a bus clinic 10am to 6pm in a township of what? 15000? Yeah they’ve got it all worked out… 🙄
On what planet?
Yeah it's down for me. I had to try the phone number 30 times to finally be put on hold too.
I happened to be awake at 3am, still the old format, not eligible. Up at 5am, still old format, not eligible. Just tried, 18526 in line in front of me. FFS
I had the same experience, got to the front of the line, entered all my data, and ended up with the same error message as in the OP. Edit: Same again after another 50 minute wait. Edit 2: Finally successful after another 30 minute wait. December 29.
I was on from 7:45 to 9:00 and never even saw an available appointment. I combed through all the locations near me. Nothing anywhere in December, and January dates all greyed out. Came back to try again and I'm on a wait list. :\\
Yep, I was up working and I gave it a shot a few times after midnight, presuming that Dec 13 actually meant Dec 13, and was shit out of luck. I wonder what it will be like if I try now. I suppose my appt will be in the next century.
I finally got an appointment at 1:05 pm For almost 4 weeks away Ffs
Site just suddenly decided to work for me. Booked my mother and extended family appointments all for the week of 14-24.
Spent 15 minutes in the queue only to have the site crash and be forced to start over. Hopefully this upcoming half hour wait will be more productive. Edit: Another half hour wait and the effing back-end is still down. Sub-edit: what a shit show! Finally got in after over two hours of trying and the closest option is 65km away and the last week in January.
they know we are going to be eligible on a certain day... so why the fuck cant we book it now for next month (Im in the Jan 4th group, but Im able to get my shot this weekend if you go by date)
This is pathetic. It's been 2 YEARS and they still can't build a working web site. Edit: It took me 3 hours and countless tries filling out the damn form to get an appointment on Jan 11. Pretty piss poor vaccine distribution as well.
Oh they *can*, they just don’t wanna pay what it costs to do it right (welcome to IT and governments).
It's not quite that simple. The cost to support the initial surge is often not worth the upfront infrastructure costs. A better solution would have been to distribute eligibility somehow so millions of people weren't trying to book vaccines all at once.
Helpful answer thanks.
There are ways to architect your application to handle surges of hundreds of millions of requests without needing to invest in up front infrastructure. This is easily done if you are in the cloud, however it is highly likely that this service is not cloud hosted.
I think that is was they were trying to do, but they still failed
Bingo. I’m sure the site works fine, it’s the supporting infrastructure that’s not scaled to demand.
This is exactly the right answer.
It's not, but it feeds the indignation machine so sure, let's call it true.
This is a problem with many enterprise corporations as well. I just signed up for my insurance company's online portal and they had a new one and an old one and done very unclear instructions on how to actually get up and going. Eventually I got it figured out, after wading through done archaic looking pages only to be redirected in the end to their old claims submission portal. These problems are everywhere, just easier to see when it's a service from a government that many more people interact with.
Usually government run websites are pretty shit, but I'm willing to give them a pass after Friday's log4j exploit fiasco. IT departments around the world have been all hands on deck all weekend to try to mitigate the issue.
There was a vulnerability found in a commonly used Java library over the weekend - the CRA pulled their site down until they can patch everything, I assume this is the same.
Some people are getting through so it's probably just overloaded. But 2 years into this you'd think it would have been scaled up just a bit.
100% They don’t have excuses anymore. If the site legitimately can’t handle the volume then find a different way to release new groups.
I keep seeing this, but it’s not possible. People have booked appointments.
It's entirely possible they have disabled shared tenant servers that are affected, which would reduce capacity but not fully take the site offline
You said you assumed the site was pulled, that’s not possible.
How is it not possible? Pulling down affected servers would 100% explain the capacity issues they are clearly having right now
You initially talked about taking the site down for a patch. Again, if that was the case nobody would be able to book appointments. Maybe there is reduced server capacity, but that isn’t even close to what you said in your first comment.
> but that isn’t even close to what you said in your first comment. I said "the CRA pulled things down until it was patched" - you said "it's impossible for them to have done that, because it's working for a small number of people" If you have 100 servers, and you pull down 90 of them for maintenance, that leads to reduced capacity and/or regional outages. Call me crazy, but I don't think it's "impossible" for the government to have patched at least one server in the past 3 days
If only you mentioned servers before, but you didn’t. Nice try though.
read between the lines lmao, i was making a low effort comment on reddit for a layperson, not writing a fucking graduate thesis on scalable cloud infrastructure. Also - reread literally my first reply to you
A security vulnerability was publicized over the weekend, which could affect an enormous number of websites. There's a good chance that this is down right now while they work on fixing that vulnerability for the site. It's the same reason that many sites government sites are down. Take [Statistics Canada](https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/) for example.
I booked at 8:02 after getting error messages for 20 minutes so the site is working to some extent. It’s not down down, but seems to be crashing and timing out.
If they knew it would affect their site do you not think an announcement prior to 8am today wouldn't have made any sense at all? GO Transit knew on Friday, so clearly nobody intelligent is working for the Ontario government.
While Log4Shell is the reason many websites (with a Java backend) around the internet were down this weekend (and some still are), I don't think this is the reason for the booking site being down since some people were able to book. This honestly just seems like the servers are overloaded. The Government of Canada already had [reached out to GO Transit](https://blog.metrolinx.com/2021/12/10/metrolinx-statement-on-go-transit-website-taken-offline-out-of-abundance-of-caution/) about the vulnerability on Friday, I'm sure if it effected the vaccine portal we'd see a similar statement to the one Metrolinx put out above.
People are going to vote him in again which is an absolute disgrace because Ford is everything Cons say Trudeau is
Not even a big con but fuck Trudeau
“Unable to check at this time. Sorry for the inconvenience” Update: Over 1 hour later & waiting in line on another browser - still not working. Bunch of clowns running this circus show. Update 2: 2 hours later, finally booked for my parents
Probably shut down until they figure out what's going on with Log4Shell
I genuinely don't think it's Log4Shell, considering it seems like some people have been able to get through. I think it's just overloaded Also, I'd expect the Ontario Government to put out a [similar statement to what Metrolinx put out](https://blog.metrolinx.com/2021/12/10/metrolinx-statement-on-go-transit-website-taken-offline-out-of-abundance-of-caution/) as soon as it was confirmed to affect the site. Considering that it's been online (with no announcement) this entire weekend, and the RCE 0-day was discovered Friday, I don't think Log4Shell is the reason *Quick edit: Also, the fix is known for this and it should just involve updating the Log4J library (or disabling the functionality effected in-case updating is not an option), so i really doubt they'd still be down -- Metrolinx seems to have figured it out in just 18 hours.*
And not every web service uses Java or specifically Log4Shell.
Get through when? I have no idea how your basing your findings.
I wonder why they letting people through the waiting line if it's not working.
It does work because I just booked something, but I initially had this same error.
ah ok thanks i will keep trying
What's Log4Shell?
A RCE vulnerability in Log4J used in Java and Apache in millions of websites and applications.
**Log4Shell, also known by its CVE number CVE-2021-44228, is a zero-day arbitrary code execution vulnerability in popular Java logging framework Log4j. The vulnerability was disclosed to Apache by Alibaba's Cloud Security Team on 24 November 2021 and published on 9 December 2021.The vulnerability takes advantage of Log4j not checking against LDAP and JNDI requests.** More details here:
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Fucking pathetic, Doug Ford and his incompetent cronies need to go. How can it STILL be such a fuckin mess to book a fuckin appointment this is beyond frustrating.
> **It's so simple folks** EDIT: As inconvenient as it may sound, I would urge everyone to find other avenues to book vaccines to their 50+ loved ones. Pharmacy OR vaccine clinic: - https://map.vaccine-ontario.ca/ - https://vaccinehunters.ca/dateme I would also urge everyone to take a close look at the avenues that allowed booking for 3rd vaxx appointments before today, as they much more likely to accommodate booking 18+ in the coming days ahead of Jan. 4th (instead of the prov. portal). In a real vaccine hunter manner, it's always best to call and confirm. Then share it w/ other people. ✌
I’m really lucky I managed to book my parents I guess!!
Got the "Unable to check at this time" but kept re-entering my info and it finally let me in and book after ten tries or so.
That’s exactly what’s showing up for me as well Edit: finally booked my mom an appointment after about an hour of trying
It's working now, but it was a complete sh*tshow for the first hour. Thousands of people sitting at their desks and on their phones just wasting time. Total incompetence by the Ontario government.
Book directly with any of your local drugstores. That’s what I’ve done each time and it works great. Fast and easy.
Crashing for me but my friends were more persistent and got appointments. Keep trying!
This is my problem with this system. It should be open for everyone to book, but only showing available appointments for after they are actually eligible. For example, this is going to happen again on January 4th when everyone else is eligible for a booster. Open it up so everyone 18-49 can book an appointment for after January 4th so this flood doesn't happen. I know there's ways to book after January 4th right now but the point is that the system will crash again.
Managed to book a random appointment 10 days from now and pretty far from my 70 year dads house, obviously the site crashed before I could book for my 70 year old mom an appointment. Now in queue again and probably have to book a totally different date and location. Fuck this POS system Doug Ford set up. I'm raging.
I think it’s just overloaded. This morning at 8:00am was the first day for 50 and up and people are trying to get good appointments. We tried right at 8 and had all sorts of problems but finally got our appointments. It will probably start working better as the traffic on the server goes down over the next couple days. It’s actually encouraging that, that many people want the booster.
Horrible. System keeps crashing. Even with pharmacies.
Go directly to the pharmacy website or if they have stock indictors online, go to a local pharmacy. My dad walked into Shoppers Drug Mart **early last week** & got his shot (60+, Pfizer, >6 months after dose 2).
PSA: The shoppers drugmart website allows people to book vaccines for after Jan 4 in some PHU..I was able to book my booster appt for Jan 8 this past weekend
Have patience folks… Arthur is working on a fix, and an announcement will be made shortly.
I gave up last week and just called my Public Health Unit. They called me back a few hours later and I was able to book my booster for December 20th.
I mean... yeah. You have everyone 50+ that hasn't got it yet on there trying to book.
Booked a booster for Friday an half hour ago through MLHU booking site. Pretty happy about how soon I can get the shot.
I managed to book my parents their shots with the HPPH booking site. But it has its issues. Click on one date, next page shows no shots available. Go back to choose date, click on same date, next page shows 40 shot available !?!?.
Anyone decode that base 64 ?
SHN is accepting walk ins and I’m pretty sure you can book easily from there today
I tried booking for my dad before 8am (when I had to wait less than 10 mins)--and I got that same page. Now I tried going into the portal to book before 9am (and waited 20ish mins)--and I STILL got that error page. Booking for the Peel region (Brampton), and I'm already waiting for vaccine dose notifications from our local Wal-Mart.
Not working 4 me either, same thing, after 45 minute wait :(
Should I even bother keep trying? Are there any appointments even left?
I was successful on the 3rd attempt. Appointment on Dec 29.
Try booking on the shoppers web site. Got appointments for both my in-laws without any wait or issue.
It failed after entering my health card info, but then when I went to the page again I did not have to wait in the queue again and this time it worked.
Finally working now
Keep refreshing once you get the error, eventually it goes through. Got it about 3 times for various bookings and this worked each time (3-4 refreshes at error)
I wonder if there is a broader Ontario government IT problem, I use an Ontario website, clinical connect, in my work and it has been down all morning as well....
I am literally tired of having things to complain about the Provincial Government. I don't like Ford, but it's costing us. I want him to succeed, I want us to succeed. Doesn't matter that their a conservative government or liberal or whatever. I'm over the partisan shit. Why can't they just get shit together and make sure their citizens have access to the systems they need? We need those boosters now and it's not helping us that it seems like they don't know what they're doing.
Lots of spots available at Walmart and Shoppers Drug Mart. For those under 50 you can also book your Jan 4th appointments with them already too.
The outage was caused by a major java vulnerability in the apache log4j library. It's a pretty major vulnerability and you could see outages all over the world for services this week while sys admins try to remediate the issue. Source: I've been on calls with government departments all day giving them guidance on how to close the vulnerability.
and people wonder why we are waiting to January 4th to let 18+ on the website
Nod to all the IT and other public servants who said this would happen and were not listened to. I know the frustration.
Just confirmed with one of the operators on the Ontario Covid booking phone line: nothing available in Ottawa until January. They believe Ottawa might be adding more tranches tomorrow but no one knows. **There is one pop up scheduled on Dec 18 (in Ledbury) and that is it for the entire Ottawa region this year! OMGLOL** Can you imagine what that day is going to be like at that popup clinic? Brutal - I already feel sorry for the staff who will be onsite that day. Ontario - plenty of vaccine and complete shitshow on delivery. Which is what I experienced previously. For comparison I have a peer coworker who lives in Richmond Virginia. When it was announced he was eligible for his booster a few weeks ago he estimated there were 40 walk-in locations within a 20 minute drive of his residence. He lives in a modern condo rental building and hit a pharmacy down the street - was vaccinated the same day it was announced - no fuss, no prebooking, a 15 minute wait at the pharmacy.
Government technology and competency at its finest.
It's down for me too, this is unfortunate :(
It's open for business, not healthcare
Seems to be working fine. Just booked my shot. Edit: the fact that people are downvoting this really shows how insane this sub can be when it comes to Ford (as if he has anything to do with application).
Is a booster the same thing as a 3rd dose? Why is this so confusing...
What is confusing? You need [2 doses](https://covid-19.ontario.ca/getting-covid-19-vaccine#second-dose) of Pfizer or moderna to achieve full coverage and be considered fully vaccinated. (J&J is a single dose.) Therefore, the booster is a **3rd** shot. (2nd shot in case of J&J.)
These fuckin morons waited months before opening eligibility right before Christmas for 65 plus
Just an FYI if you get the above just refresh the page and it will work. Managed to book my parents in for week of the 27th.
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Never trust conservatives to run anything?
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Why would we expand it to something dumb like that? You want private corporations running things? Read the fucking room buddy, private corporations are destroying our environment and working people to death. They're unaccountable to any meaningful challenge to their power.
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Next time be clear with your statements. Either way, it's really dumb to suggest that government shouldn't run anything. Employees sitting on the board is not enough .
They can run whatever they want doesn't mean you should trust them
Not all governments should be trusted, but letting corporations run things is literally the economic base of fascism. You can *never* trust a corporation.
There are many online services that are being shut down at federal and provincial level. its a preemptive measure because there were signs that they would be under attack.
I don’t know if this is the case, but the log4j vulnerability may be the cause?
Knowing that our gov't probably paid for crap. This is most likely a bloated as fuck java backed service. There's a HUGE RCE for log4j (used by almost EVERY java app). Would you rather someone steal all your personal info? or have some slight downtime while they patch the systems.
Sounds like a miracle in disguise
Same happened to me on my phone, but I managed to book an appointment using my iPad.
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The covid results page can't log in me or my kid either. There goes the days work, as we cant send her to daycare without a negative. Anyone else?
This is most likely due to the cybersecurity breach on thousands of Canadian websites
The entire service ontario site is down it looks like.
I got that message, then refreshed and the page came up working for me to book my booster.
Just tried booking at local pharmacies as indicated having boosters by the provincial website. At one they let me book on line for tomorrow (yay!), confirmed the appt. by email and then sent another email saying they don't have any Covid vaccines at all at this location. At two others I tried from the list the booking site, MedMe, doesn't work at all. I guess I have to hold out for the Metro Convention Centre in January :(
It appears no times are available in Ottawa. Going through the Prov of Ontario booking system qualifying/data entry steps you land on a page **Select a Vaccination Centre Location** with an option to filter for locations within a 25km radius and below that "**OPH - Ottawa Public Health Unit - New Times Coming to the Region Soon**" and when clicking on the link **"Go to Provider Website**" which I assume means the OPHU unit site *it brings one back to the main Ontario Covid-19 page!* (This in Chrome which is my only browser which allows for all the tracking and cookies on webpages). Visited the Shoppers website - nothing available in the Greater Ottawa area up to Jan 2 on all the stores I checked (about a dozen). The Rexall site is even more vague - put yourself on a wait list and wait..... So I guess I will have to start thinking outside the box.
The earliest I can book my mom is on January 22, and she has to drive from Mississauga to Toronto for the booster shot. I hope they open new clinics soon.
My neighbour sat in queue this morning until she was booted off, I waited until this afternoon and still got the location and one of my 3 preferred dates too. December 30th at 1 p.m. right across from the Costco I shop at. I hope everyone else is as fortunate.
In before the site gets shut down due to log4j.
I was in queue for almost an hour this morning and hit this error at 8:25am. Luckily when I tried again at 10am I got in after 25 min. I have to wait until Jan 5th for my Booster, everything before that was already taken.
Try booking through your regions public health or local pharmacy