News & Politics

Here Are All the Error Messages We Got Trying to Register for the Vaccine

Today's Covid vaccine signup was another fail.

Covid vaccine registration for people with medical conditions in all DC zip codes opened this morning, and the results were decidedly unstellar. Yesterday’s rollout for people in priority zip codes also had a number of glitches, and the city promised things would be better. But the sheer number of people vying for slots this morning apparently created an entirely new plethora of technological setbacks, including issues with the captcha and unexplained error messages that prevented registration later in the process for people who did manage to get through after repeated captcha rejections.

Several Washingtonian employees were among this morning’s hopefuls, and all reported getting stuck in an endless cycle of refreshing and captcha frustration. Here are the various error messages we encountered.

 

Users kept getting “Captcha incorrect” error messages despite entering the letters and numbers correctly. When users pressed “play audio,” often nothing happened, posing serious roadblocks for the visually impaired. Captcha information also sometimes vanish as soon as a user started typing.

Users received a plethora of messages at different intervals of the signup process indicating…well, we don’t really know. But it certainly wasn’t working!

 

Of course, the website isn’t the only way to register. Perhaps things were going better over at the city’s telephone registration? Well, take a listen:

 

Better luck next week!

Jane Recker
Assistant Editor

Jane is a Chicago transplant who now calls Cleveland Park her home. Before joining Washingtonian, she wrote for Smithsonian Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times. She is a graduate of Northwestern University, where she studied journalism and opera.