The District’s phone and online system crashed on Thursday morning just as thousands of residents became newly eligible to sign up for 4,350 appointments for the COVID-19 vaccine.

Mayor Muriel Bowser said this week that appointments would open at 9 a.m. to residents living in priority ZIP codes who are 65 or older, are 18 and older and have a qualifying medical condition ranging from asthma to cancer, or work in a number of essential jobs from child care to grocery stores.

But the demand almost immediately overwhelmed the city’s online and phone system, with many callers reporting that they couldn’t even get through on the phone. Others reported that even when they did get through online, the system wasn’t updated to reflect the new eligibility criteria for pre-existing conditions and essential workers.

DC Health announced Thursday afternoon that it will open 3,500 new COVID-19 vaccine appointments on Saturday morning following those glitches in the registration portal. The appointments will be available at 9:00 a.m, and people with qualifying health conditions who live in priority zip codes will be eligible to sign up for them.

A spokesperson for Bowser attributed the issues to a “technical review failure that resulted in eligible residents with a qualifying medical condition being unable to register.”

“As the IT team worked to stabilize the website due to heavy traffic, there were delays in finding and fixing the issue with the eligibility criteria,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “The technical review failure has now been addressed, and with tens of thousands of residents newly eligible for the vaccine this week, we are currently working with Microsoft in anticipation of extremely high traffic during future appointment releases.”

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John A. Morris, a 55-year-old Northeast resident who has ALS and asthma, was one of the thousands of people who tried scheduling an appointment online Thursday. He was excited when he got the notification on Wednesday that he’d be eligible to book a vaccine appointment the following morning. 

“I was like a kid at Christmas yesterday when I [saw] my group is available,” Morris told WAMU/DCist. 

But his elation faded on Thursday morning. The registration portal crashed multiple times as Morris tried to get into the system and fill out the eligibility questionnaire. When he finally made it through, he received an error message saying he wasn’t eligible to book an appointment — despite fulfilling the zip code and health condition criteria. 

“I want to get this done so I can get a vaccine … so I can feel safer,” he said. “And then to find out these results this morning — this is very disappointing, very frustrating.” 

Morris tried calling the District’s vaccine call center, too, but the call dropped. He says he expected better management of the vaccine registration process from the District.

“This should be a smooth, well-oiled machine,” he says. 

Kate Wulff, a 46-year-old Brookland resident with a qualifying medical condition, also wasn’t able to book a vaccine appointment, despite wrestling with both the online portal and call line. 

“It’s annoying. It shouldn’t be like winning the lottery to get an appointment,” she told WAMU/DCist. “It just seems like a terrible sort of Hunger Games, Lord of the Flies kind of situation.” 

Others had more luck. Marie Fritz, 47, of the Penn Branch neighborhood in Ward 7, has a qualifying medical condition and a spouse who works in a health lab, sometimes handling coronavirus-positive samples. 

Fritz estimates she spent close to an hour reloading and reloading the web portal, enduring multiple webpage crashes, battling a captcha that kept disappearing, and re-entering her demographic information almost forty times. Finally, just before 10 am — an hour after vaccine appointments became available — she tried to reach the call center. Three calls dropped, but her fourth try went through. After a half hour on hold, Fritz successfully booked her appointment. 

Fritz told WAMU/DCist she’s grateful to the “amazing” call center worker who got her appointment booked, but she worries about people navigating the process without high speed internet, tech savvy, or the time to spend wrestling with the web portal in the morning. 

“There has to be another way for people to be able to access these vaccinations where they don’t have to sit and do this,” she said.

On Twitter, multiple D.C. councilmembers said they’d heard about the issues, and that crews were working to resolve them.

“We apologize for the issues this morning with the Vaccination Registration site. Due to the high volume of traffic on http://vaccinate.gov, you may experience delays,” wrote D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson. “IT engineers are working to resolve the issues as soon as possible.”

At-Large Councilmember Christina Henderson said she heard from residents online and via text of the website issues this morning, and said she shared the frustration with the website issues, especially after D.C. saw a similar problem occur when vaccines opened to residents ages 65 and older in January.

“I think people expect that at this point, almost three months into the vaccine distribution process, that we would have been able to advise, manage, and maintain a website that can easily facilitate individuals being able to sign up for the vaccine vaccine,” Henderson told DCist/WAMU Thursday morning. “I recognize that in this particular situation, it is a life or death right for some people.”

Online, dozens of frustrated D.C. residents posted screenshots of the vaccination portal, reporting that the site denied them access to an appointment despite their qualifying medical conditions.

“I am nearly in tears after having to reload, reload, reload,” one user wrote.

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Throughout the course of the morning, some people posted on neighborhood listservs that they were able to secure appointments for their loved ones with qualifying medical conditions. (A spokeswoman for Bowser confirmed that people under the age of 65 were able to get appointments.) But shortly after 10 a.m., DC Health posted on Twitter that all the available online appointments had been booked.

On Friday, Feb. 26, D.C. residents 18 and older with qualifying medical conditions – regardless of ZIP code – will be able to schedule a vaccine appointment online. DC Health estimates that will widen vaccine eligibility to 160,000 residents.

DC Health has also announced that the District will transition into a new registration system next month, one aimed at allowing eligible people more flexibility when they log on to try to book an appointment. 

Morris says he’ll try his luck with the existing registration system again tomorrow, but he’s not optimistic about getting an appointment. And when he received a text with DC Health’s statement about Thursday’s glitches, his frustration was clear. 

“No excuse is acceptable,” he said. “Apologizing for incompetence is complacency.”

Colleen Grablick contributed reporting.

This story has been updated with information from DC Health that all of Thursday’s online vaccine appointments had been booked, and with comment from the offices of Mayor Muriel Bowser and At-Large Councilmember Christina Henderson.