It should start on Wednesday: After a test run lasting around a month, all around 3.5 million local students and technical school students should be able to apply online for the energy price flat rate of 200 euros that politicians had promised them months ago. Many potential beneficiaries who were enrolled at a university or in a technical college as of December 1, 2022 and were hoping for quick relief for the increased heating and electricity costs apparently wanted to make use of this option. The onslaught resulted in massive technical problems on the official application platform and on the federal user account (“BundID”), which is required for identification.
Initially, many authorized persons failed when attempting to register at id.bund.de with their identity card. Several readers of heise online complained that they were prevented from downloading the required authorization certificate due to technical errors and network problems on the federal website. This applied to several tested web services with an online ID function. The “View my data” function in the Ausweisapp2 was not affected. Only after several attempts was it possible to create a regular BundID account.
No more waiting rooms since Thursday
On the actual application platform www.einmalzahlen200.de, many of those affected then found themselves in a virtual waiting room. The hurdle of this type of telephone loop initially proved insurmountable for many users. “After another half hour of waiting, I was shown a simple button: ‘Submit an application’. Click on it, again waiting for half an hour,” reported one reader. The form was then displayed – even pre-filled with the personal data stored at id.bund.de. However, the two fields for the access code and PIN, which are also required, could not be edited. The user was unable to complete and submit the application.
Similar complaints also accumulated on Twitter, especially on Wednesday. A spokesman for the Ministry for Infrastructure and Digital Saxony-Anhalt (MID), which was responsible for creating the portal for the federal states and the Federal Ministry of Education, spoke to heise online of initial difficulties. There have been no more waiting rooms since Thursday. 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. You can submit an application until September 30th. The creators of the website Keinmalzahlen200.de have sharply criticized the procedure.
(mki)
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