A government super-app that bundles national and local services into a single platform has now handled upward of 800 million transactions, the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) reported this week, even as that same demand briefly knocked the system offline earlier this year.
The volume figure caps a sharp rise in adoption. According to DICT Undersecretary for E-Government David Almirol Jr., traffic to eGovPH climbed 700 percent over the past 12 months, a pace that ran well ahead of what the agency had projected. Downloads now arrive at a clip of roughly 100,000 per day, pushing the cumulative total to 56 million.
That growth came with a cost. Almirol said the strain on the platform turned severe in April, when a service interruption took several functions down. He likened the failure to overloaded wiring. “Usage surged significantly. It was like an electrical system being overloaded because demand exceeded our capacity, eventually exhausting our available cloud resources,” he said.
Keeping the app alive during the disruption meant borrowing from elsewhere. The DICT said it drew on backup systems and redundancy resources that had been set aside for disaster recovery to maintain service. At a Senate hearing examining the outage, Almirol noted that engineers also switched off other government systems sharing the same cloud environment to clear room for eGovPH to keep running.
The platform currently links services across more than 1,300 government systems, covering digital IDs, social welfare programs, permits and licenses, and a channel for citizen complaints. It is one of 28 digital platforms the agency operates.
To prevent a repeat, Almirol said he is in close coordination with the Department of Budget and Management on securing additional money, both for eGovPH and for the rest of the platforms under the DICT’s watch.
