BOSTON (AP/WHDH) — Massachusetts’ vaccine appointment website appeared to be working on Thursday, about a week after it crashed from a flood of people looking to book a time for a shot, but slots quickly filled up and some people were told they may be waiting hours.
About 50,000 new appointments were made available at six mass vaccination sites around the state, but many more people than that are eligible for a vaccine.
The state on its official twitter feed said Thursday: “Due to a severely limited vaccine supply and a large population of individuals eligible to get a vaccine, this week’s 50,000 appointments at mass vaccination sites across the Commonwealth are nearly all filled.”
People unable to schedule an appointment were told by the state that it may take several attempts over the course of a few weeks to get an open slot.
A new feature of the website is a “digital waiting room” where users will be placed before proceeding to the vaccination page, but there were reports of hours-long waits on Thursday.
Richard Wells, of the Milton Select Board, spent the morning trying to find appointments for elderly residents but found no success.
“At one point I was down to a four minute wait….Then it jumped up to 200 minutes,” Wells said.
A 73-year-old boat builder on Cape Cod reported a similar experience as was given an astronomically long wait time.
“I told me that I was going to have to wait 2,600-some-odd minutes in order to book an appointment,” David Foynes said.
A screenshot shared by Carol Geary indicated that she was given a wait time of 80,330 minutes.
Ann Marie Pruyn, a retired Red Cross worker, said she kept clicking appointments that appeared to be available but kept disappearing.
Tiffany Tate, the head of a Maryland non-profit that sold the VaxFinder software to the state for hundreds of thousands of dollars, said she was not personally aware of how many clicks the site would get.
Tate also suggested that the state could have bought more software to ensure a better user experience.
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