Sofia city hall will not annul any applications for kindergarten vacancies, despite a host of problems at the launch of the kg.sofia.bg registration website on February 4, deputy mayor told a news conference.
Authorities considered the option, given that thousands of users experienced registration problems when the website launched and only a lucky few were successful early on.
Managing to register was pure chance and this pure chance could not be a criteria for enrolling one child in a kindergarten or not, the head of the municipal education department, Kamen Iordanov, said.
Despite initial trouble, the parents of more than 8000 children managed to register them in by 12.15pm, Focus news agency reported. According to Iordanov, nearly 10 000 people applied for registration.
On-line registration for kindergarten in Sofia turned out to be mission impossible when the website kg.sofia.bg went down on the morning of its launch. The launch of the website itself was delayed by 40 minutes due to technical trouble, Bulgarian National Radio (BNR) reported.
Fandukova blamed hackers for the problems. Sirma Group, which developed and hosted the website, expected such problems and dealt with the situation accordingly, she said, as quoted by BNR.
Sirma Group representative Vladimir Aleksiev said that 70 per cent of the attempted registrations on the site were hacking attempts. Nearly 200 IP addresses have already been banned, as there were too many attempted registrations from some IP addresses per second, he said.
But Andrei Markov, system administrator at mobile phone operator Mtel, said it was not unusual for an Internet service provider to have a restricted number of real IP addresses and for all its subscribers to use the same small number of IP addresses. In the case of kg.sofia.bg, it was possible that a great number of the users of one provider were trying to enter the same website and the system detected them as hacker attack, he said, as quoted by Focus news agency.
Sirma Group said that 10 000 people were trying to enter the website simultaneously and the two servers bought by the Sofia municipality did not withstand the pressure.
