The head of the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) has apologized over the failed pilot launch of the online registration for the national identification (ID) system.
Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Karl Kendrick T. Chua on Monday, May 3, took full responsibility for the technical glitch that marred the online registration for national ID during its pilot launching on April 30, Friday.
“First of all I would like to extend my sincerest apologies to the Filipino people for what happened, and there is no excuse for what happened. I take full responsibility,” Chua said during an interview on ABS-CBN News Channel.
Chua explained that the Philippine Identification System (PhilSys) Step 1 registration website was overwhelmed by online registrants during the first minutes of the pilot launch.
“What happened was, the system was tested for 16,000 simultaneous users per minute, with ability to scale up to 35,000 users per minute, but in the first minute, we saw 46,000 users. In other words, our capacity was not enough, the demand is so much,” the official explained.
The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), an attached agency of NEDA and the main implementor of the national ID, also had apologized for the technical fail.
“What we do right now is to review our system so that we can increase the load. The problem is really the demand, it's like, you open a new theme park or restaurant… sometimes on the first day everyone wants to participate,” Chua pointed out.
The technical hiccup comes as the government moves to online for the national ID’s Step 1 registration process, which involves the collection of demographic information such as gender, date of birth, blood type, and address.
Despite some technical difficulty, the NEDA chief said the PhilSys website can still be accessed but only a limited number of applicants, or around 2,000 users.
“It's still open, but it can’t answer tens of thousands. We're hoping by the coming days we will get back and serve more people. We assure you we are fixing this. We have experts all over the world, and we will relaunch it as soon as we can,” Chua said.
Since October 2020, a total of 33.3 million Filipinos have completed the Step 1 process, while 6.4 million registrants finished Step 2 that involves biometric information of applicants.
Chua said the PSA accomplished the initial phases of the registration for the national ID through house-to-house collection of demographic data.