Health Minister Marek Krajci (OLANO) on Tuesday dismissed the general director of the National Centre for Health Information (NCZI) Peter Bielik, installing Robert Suja as interim director until a selection process for the post is completed, Health Ministry spokesperson Zuzana Eliasova advised on the same day.
The dismissal followed the crash of the registration website for vaccination against COVID-19 on Monday (March 8). The crash was first assumed to be caused by an alleged distributed denial-of-service cyberattack. However, on Tuesday evening, the NCZI reported it had probably occurred due to a problem with the data connection of the Government cloud, which registered a 44-percent error rate.
"One of the factors in the high number of requests, which seemed like an attack at first, was the growing number of volunteer websites that unsystematically call the Application Programming Interface (API) seeking vacant vaccination spots," said Bauch.
NCZI assured the public that private personal data had not been put in jeopardy, added Bauch. In order to remedy the situation, NCZI plans to launch a new vaccination app in collaboration with the Health Minister next week.
