The web platform to apply for the bike bonus can't stand the shock, the excess of requests sends the SPID servers into a tailspin: here's what's happening on the click day of the mobility voucher.
A day to forget for those who dream of a digital country: the long-awaited "click day" of the mobility voucher started half an hour late, compared to the scheduled time of 9:00, continued with an attempted online scam on a fake site (which has nothing to do with the official platform of the Government) and is continuing among a thousand difficulties for users due to overcrowding that not only forced the platform to indroduce the waiting list, but also caused collateral damage to the system of SPID, the digital identity needed to request the 500 euro bonus.
The difficulty of the platform is confirmed by the ceiling still remaining: at 2:30 p.m., in fact, less than 20 million of the 210 available were assigned and the queue reached over 600 thousand users. A sign that the system did not keep up the pace and was not able to satisfy the very high, but predictable, number of requests. But, besides the damage, there is the mockery: the users who pass the waiting list phase have 30 minutes to complete the procedure and request the mobility voucher, after which they are spat out from the system, but very often they are not enough because the high load of requests has sent KO also the servers of the Identity Providers that offer the SPID.
Good Mobility: the problems with SPID
The SPID system requires that whoever issues the digital identity to the citizen must confirm it every time they access a site through SPID. Exactly as in the case of the application for the bike and scooter bonus. The IT systems of the Identity Providers are all in crisis at the moment: Sielte ID and PosteID, two of the most widely used in Italy, do not issue the OK to proceed on the platform in time. The typical answer is "too many requests".
In fact, it is not even possible to put all the responsibility for what is happening on the Identity Providers, who have IT systems calibrated on a daily use far away from today's numbers.
Mobility voucher: there is already talk of a class action
On the Web, in particular on Twitter, the protest for the inefficiency of the click day for the mobility voucher mounts. There are also those who joke and put up for sale a good place on the list, while the bulk of the comments are so angry it is better not to report it.
The reason is simple: with an average expenditure for scooters and bicycles of about 350 euros most of those who are trying to access the Web platform for the bonus bike are waiting for a refund of 150-200 euros (remember that the refund is 60%, for a maximum of 500 euros). That in a period like this, in which we are slowly slipping towards a lockdown 2.0, are convenient for everyone.
Two words seem destined to dominate the "word cloud" of what is happening today: Class Action. That is, a class action lawsuit against Sogei (Società Generale d'Informatica S.p.A), the public company owned by the Ministry of Economy and Finance that set up the Web platform to request the bonus that has not withstood the impact.
The problem, from which a lawsuit could arise, is that the government has chosen the click day method: whoever arrives first takes the bonus, whoever arrives late does not. And, what's more, the bonus has no ISEE barrier and therefore everyone can apply for it. What happened today, therefore, was largely predictable because it was the Government itself to tell Italians to pour en masse on the site of the bike bonus as soon as possible.