Japan’s Covid-19 vaccine booking system crashes, compounding woes

Tokyo: Technical problems derailed Japan’s Covid-19 vaccination booking system Wednesday, compounding frustration over the government’s handling of new outbreaks of infections and an inoculation drive that critics say has been 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.