Car plate sale: Gone in 44 minutes
Print Edition
A MOCK auction held on Sunday to test a new online system for selling car license plates “didn’t achieve the expected result” due to a massive overload of data, the Shanghai government said yesterday.
The simulation involved 69,452 people bidding for 5,000 imaginary plates in a test of a new website-based system that is scheduled to go live later this month.
The event started at 7:30pm and all went well for the first 44 minutes. But at 8:14pm, a massive data flow crashed the system, said its operator Shanghai Commodity International Auction Co.
One of the thousands of people who took part in the event said in an online post that he spent most of the time staring at a frozen computer screen.
“It got stuck every time I tried to change my bid,” the person wrote on Weibo.
“Then it kept asking me to check my Internet connection, which I knew was working fine,” he said.
Other people complained of being booted out of the system or being unable to see their verification codes.
“Our servers are designed to handle 200,000 bidders, but at 8:14pm the amount of traffic was far above that, which is why it broke down,” Zhou Bin, vice president of Shanghai Commodity International was quoted as saying on Shanghai TV.
The overload was due to the company’s bandwidth being filled with “abnormal and junk data,” he said without elaborating.
The company will investigate the incident and arrange with the relevant authorities to stage another simulated auction soon, he said.
The operator has been in charge of the city’s car plate auction since 1992.
People often complain about how much they have to pay to take part in the sales.
The fee is 100 yuan (US$16) and is non-refundable. The company allegedly makes about 180 million yuan a year from it.
In January, four students from East China University of Political Science and Law filed a lawsuit against the company over the legitimacy of the service fee. The case has yet to be heard in court.
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