A PROMOTIONAL online business system behind a government scheme to revive Canberra shopfronts during the pandemic has been forced to bring in “additional development resources” to fix its problems and restore customer confidence.

The ChooseCBR website has crashed twice inside a week after complaints that it had been unreliable before it was taken offline on Thursday (June 10) over ongoing technical issues.

Works continued over the long weekend to make improvements to the database to better deal with the “very high volume of customer and business activity simultaneously”.

The fix was found to lie with the implementation of “read-replica databases” after failing to cope with demand in the first 36 hours of its relaunch following a trial promotion over the Christmas period last year.

“The developer is working to set up a new test environment so we can do load testing,” an ACT government spokesperson said.

Authorities plan to directly update businesses that opted into the scheme and were eligible should they have an annual turnover of less than $10 million once a solution is thoroughly tested.

The scheme that Minister for Business Tara Cheyne has backed and that offers government-subsidised discounts of up to 50 per cent has been heavily criticised by the ACT opposition and labelled a “dud”.

The online shutdown has affected 767 business and more than 77,000 customers – more than one in every six Canberrans – that had registered for the ChooseCBR scheme.

Vouchers were redeemable until the website were found to have a number of “intermittent technical difficulties”.

Prior to pausing the system, there were 10,654 vouchers redeemed from 553 businesses to a total value of $389,950.

This averages to about 19 vouchers redeemed per business over the two days following its launch last Wednesday.