Around 3.5 million local students and technical school students should now be able to apply online for the energy price flat rate of 200 euros that politicians had promised them months ago. However, during the initial test run, technical problems resulted in a colossal influx of users attempting to register at id.bund.de with their identity cards, causing several issues with the authorization certificate and the online ID function.
On the actual application platform, www.einmalzahlen200.de, many potential candidates initially found themselves stuck in a virtual waiting room, which proved insurmountable for many users. Even after waiting for half an hour, their applications failed to submit, as the two required fields for the access code and PIN could not be edited. Similar complaints accumulated on Twitter, especially on Wednesday.
A spokesman for the Ministry for Infrastructure and Digital Saxony-Anhalt (MID) spoke to heise online of initial difficulties. However, by Thursday, there were no more waiting rooms. By 8 a.m. on Friday, 644,627 applications had been submitted at breathtaking speed and 217,645 had already been paid out.
A spokeswoman for the education department emphasized that the application platform was “basically fully functional”. It is now “very stable”. The Federal Ministry of the Interior, which is responsible for the BundID, has so far not commented on the reported problems with the user account. An external service provider is said to have caused the outages.
Applicants can submit their requests for the energy price flat rate of 200 euros until September 30th. However, the creators of the website Keinmalzahlen200.de have criticized the procedure sharply.
