17 June 2021

ChooseCBR back online tomorrow after a week of fixes

| Dominic Giannini
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The ChooseCBR website showing site under maintenance

The ChooseCBR website crashed when the scheme was launched due to high demand. Photo: Screenshot.

The ChooseCBR voucher scheme will be back online at 7:00 am tomorrow (18 June) after being down for a week while the ACT Government and IT specialists worked to increase the site’s database capacity.

The website crashed the day it was launched (Wednesday, 9 June), and the government took it offline on Friday (11 June) when it became apparent that problems extended beyond the website’s traffic capacity.

An ACT Government spokesperson said the site has now been load tested and can cope with 600 voucher redemptions a minute in a simulated environment.

Over the past seven days, changes have been made to improve the performance of the system,” the spokesperson said.

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The government brought in Amazon Web Services for expert support and testing.

Almost $390,000 worth of vouchers were claimed before the government took the website offline, around 13 times the $30,000 claimed each day at the height of the scheme’s trial at the end of last year.

In the first two days of the scheme last week, a total of 10,654 vouchers were redeemed from 553 businesses – an average of about 19 vouchers for each business over the two days.

The government says it remains up to businesses whether they want to rejoin the scheme after the crash frustrated some local retailers so much they pulled out altogether.

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Its Saturday 19 June and just like magic the Choose CBR funding os $2 million is fully used.

So what did this achieve really? I think since the restart this week it has just enabled a lot of people who were going to buy their lunch or dinner to utilise a voucher to reduce the cost.

Did this put more money into those businesses? Probably not.

Was this a waste of $2 million of taxpayer money? Undoubtedly.

This was so dodgy. If you saw what happened in Dickson, our hard earned tax payer money being used by most likely non tax paying persons, redeeming multiple coupons (i.e. multiple accounts) buying groceries. Agree with all the comments here, this was so dodgy, I can only assume ACT government is corrupt and incompetent, not just this but the Northbourne Ave road works, dodgy building/approvals/inspectors it stinks from the top down.

Adrienne Yeo9:51 am 19 Jun 21

Did I read correctly ? $390,000 redeemed even before the website went online ? Something fishy/untoward is happening. If not, out and out scamming and corruption.

All the money is gone. The program turned into a Bonanza for Chemist Warehouse, McDonalds and Subway. I don’t think the Voucher system helped local small businesses to the same level as the multinationals. Imagine how many small restaurants are about to get tonight’s booking canceled or have no-shows when people realise the vouchers are no longer available.

And the m9ney is going to be completely used up in one day.

Honestly, this is beyond a joke how incompetent the ACT government is. They couldn’t organise themselves out of a wet paper bag.

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