The State Cashback has started, the IO app hasn't

Today, 8 December, is the day on which the Cashless Italia Plan officially starts. So the plan starts, but not the tool imagined to manage this project. The IO app, in fact, continues to be overwhelmed with requests until its activities have been frozen for over 24 hours. The problem is well known: yesterday the flow of requests was equal to about 6000 per second, preventing the servers from handling such a large flow of requests. Today the problem is aggravated by the fact that those who wanted to use cards, apps and ATMs to make payments with a 10% discount will have to postpone a few hours if the cashback has not been activated and the payment systems have not been loaded in time. br>

The IO app is not responding: the first day of cashback

Today, the first day of Status Cashback, the IO app keeps showing an error message like this:

The Wallet section is under maintenance, it will be operational again as soon as possible

Without the Wallet section it is not possible to link payment systems to your account and therefore the expenses made cannot be used for cashback purposes. Those who have managed to activate the cashback, as soon as they have loaded the payment systems, will be able to start recording their expenses; those who have not yet succeeded will instead have to wait 24 hours after activation, at which time they will be effectively validated when accessing the program.

In these hours of drama it is all too easy to point the finger at those who could, and perhaps should, foresee such high flows of demand, learning to manage the queue as it was not possible in the spring with the first bonus 600 euros or in the autumn with the Mobility Bonus. The weakness is known: when the initiatives involve high numbers of people, multiplying the access flows within a few hours, only a well-established and designed system is able to support the loads: certainly not an app in beta release, in short. .

The graphs say a lot about what happened in these hours when the number of app downloads reached 7.1 million (with over 600,000 downloads recorded yesterday alone):

Login flows with SPID and CIE on the IO app

The increase within a few days is in the order of + 2000% on average, something that has put a system in check that previously it worked (the serious problems started in the early hours of the eve, first blocking access to the app and then access to the Wallet). Patience is preached from the social channels of the IO app, waiting for moments with smaller flows and a discarded queue of registrations that bring the activities in progress back to normal.

It should be remembered that cashback does not end tomorrow, but the June 31, 2022: missing a day of shopping can be annoying, but it does not fundamentally change the overall project. It is patience to overcome problems which, at this point, are no longer solvable except in the face of a reduction in access loads by users.