Government Technology Agency NTUC website for SIRS application is down
My friend tried to login to this website, operated by NTUC, to submit an application for the Self Employed Income Relief scheme. He was not able to login.

He has been trying several times for a few days. He was not able to login.

He has wasted a lot of time. This is probably the experience of several tens of thousand of applicants.

Maybe several hundred thousand applicants are trying to login .

I can make a guess what has happened. The website was designed to carry out the entire process flow. This is a complicated process, as it probably requires to check the entered data against many government websites. Any of these links could be a cause of failure. 

The complicated system can probably handle a limited number of transactions every minute. When the volume exceeds this capacity, it is likely to crash the system. 

This is probably what had happened.

If I were to design the system, I would create a light weight website that allows the applicant to enter just the essential details - name, email, telephone, occupation. 

It will not attempt to ask for documents to be uploaded or to verify the information. 

My light weight website is considered as stage 1.

I will then send an email to the applicants with a link to go to the full website to go through the entire process. I will time the sending out of the email so that the volume is controlled to a level that the system can cope. This will not crash the system. 

Stage 1 can be considered to be a queuing system. It will manage stage 2 to spread out the actual processing of the applications. 

I hope that a person in charge can work on this this suggestion  soon. 

Tan Kin Lian
 

Add Comment

---