After the Minnesota Department of Revenue's website for its e-bike rebate program crashed on the opening day of its launch, the government entity announced the application period would reopen at 11 a.m. on July 2.
The state said overwhelming traffic was the cause of the website's June 6 crash, and will be implementing new measures for the relaunch of the site — a virtual waiting room.
"We are focused on ensuring the system is ready to handle the surge in traffic, which caused the unavailability in June, due to the limited first-come, first-serve nature of the e-bike rebate program," said Kendall Johnson, communications director for the Minnesota IT Services. "For the July 2 launch, we added the virtual waiting room, additional security measures, and completed new stress testing to ensure that the system is able to handle the traffic."
The state is still working with site host Salesforce and application developer Turnberry Solutions.
The state will give out about 1,300 rebates this year, as part of a effort to give away up to $1,500 to state residents who buy electric bicycles, cutting the cost by nearly 75%. Rebates depend on income levels. The state is limiting the application pool to 10,000 submissions.
"Due to popularity and high demand for the rebates, applicants may need to wait in a virtual waiting room before accessing the application," the Minnesota Department of Revenue said in a statement. "This will allow the system to control the surge of users when the application opens at 11 a.m. This is a similar process to what major sports teams use when selling a limited number of tickets for their playoff games."
Potential applicants will gain access to the rebate application in the order they enter the waiting room. Once in the application, they will have 15 minutes to complete and submit it. The department said only about 10,000 submissions will be accepted. Once this limit is reached, the rebate application will close, and anyone still in the waiting room will be notified that they cannot apply this year.
The state will notify each person whose application was submitted by July 9, whether they are approved, asked to provide more information, waitlisted or denied. Those who are approved will receive their e-bike rebate certificate via email on July 10.
In a June 6 statement, the Minnesota Department of Revenue said the site's external hosts — Minneapolis-based Turnberry Solutions, which developed the site, and Salesforce.com Inc. (NYSE: CRM), the host platform service provider — were troubleshooting the problems when the site crashed three hours after launching, which forced the state to postpone the launch of the e-bike rebate program.
The state paid Salesforce and Turnberry Solutions more than $153,000 to build the application portal website.
