National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) Secretary Karl Kendrick Chua has apologized and taken full responsibility following the technical glitch during the launch of the online registration for the national ID system last April 30.
“First of all I would like to extend my sincerest apologies to the Filipino people for what happened. I take full responsibility, but I hope the viewers would care to listen to the story to give people some understanding,” Chua said in an interview on ABS-CBN.
Chua said that the online system encountered technical difficulties due to the high number of online applicants.
RELATED STORY: How to obtain Philippine National ID: Here’s everything you need to know
“It is a pilot, and the main reason for piloting it is to learn, and we learned a lot,” said Chua.
The NEDA chief said that the system should have been tested for 16,000 simultaneous users per minute and has the ability to scale up to 35,000 users per minute.
“But in the first minute, we saw 46,000 users. So in other words, our capacity is not enough. The demand is so much and we thank the Filipino people for patronizing and giving it importance,” he added.
He also said that they are now reviewing their technical system on how to further improve the online registration portal.
READ ON: Duterte receives own copy of national ID from NEDA
“The problem is really the demand. It’s like you open a new theme park or restaurant. Although you are ready for the peak during holidays or weekends, sometimes on the first day, just everyone wants to participate, and we thank them but we are very sorry also for what happened,” Chua explained.
“We assure you that we are fixing this. We have experts all over the world and we will relaunch it as soon as we can,” he added.
The Philippine Statistics Authority aims to register 70 million individuals by the end of this year.
