CoWIN portal down since early August

The CoWIN portal, where the Union and State governments had together recorded over two billion vaccination doses for COVID-19, has been down since early August, a weeks-long outage that has locked many residents in India out of their vaccination certificates. 

On August 23, an official source said that they were aware of the issue, and that the outage would be addressed quickly. However, the issue remains. 

Throughout the pandemic, the CoWIN portal’s certificates were touted as a signature digital achievement of the Union government, and for several months the certificates were required for everything from travel abroad to entry into commercial spaces to essential annexures to job applications.

While COVID-19 vaccination certificates no longer play the passport-like role they did during the most serious waves of the pandemic — owing to near total coverage of at least one dose of vaccine — the outage is not without its victims. 

“I am unable to download my travel and vaccination certificates, which are essential for visa processing,” Sohail Marakkar, a Bengaluru resident, complained on social media platform X on Monday. Mr. Marakkar told The Hindu that his travel agency had included a vaccine certificate in the checklist for travelling, and that even the feature of fetching a third-party certificate through DigiLocker was not working. 

“The issue will be resolved by Monday. Team is at it,” a senior Union Health Ministry official told The Hindu on Saturday (September 6, 2025).

CoWIN (Covid Vaccine Intelligence Network), the government’s web portal for COVID-19 vaccination registration, owned and operated by India’s Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, serves the function of registration, appointment scheduling, identity verification, vaccination, and certification of each vaccinated member.

The CoWIN application was developed with five modules — the orchestration module, vaccination cold chain module, citizen registration module, vaccinator module, and the module for certificate, feedback, and adverse event following immunisation reporting. Eight vaccines — Covishield, Covaxin, Corbevax, Sputnik-V, and Corbevax, among others, had been incorporated on the platform. India in 2021 offered the CoWIN platform as a digital public good to the world to combat COVID-19.

On the current demand for the vaccine, Suranjit Chatterjee, consultant, Internal Medicine, Indraprastha Apollo Hospital, Delhi, said there was no rush for the COVID vaccine. “We are getting one or two people coming in with requests to get vaccinated, but largely there is not much demand for the vaccines,’‘ Dr. Chatterjee said.

Meanwhile, according to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) latest report on the coronavirus in the 28-day period from 21 July to 17 August 2025, 87 countries across five WHO regions reported new COVID-19 cases. 

“During this 28-day period, a total of 71,687 new cases were reported, which is a decrease compared to the 92,519 new cases reported from 95 countries in the previous 28-day period. Overall, 35 countries from Africa, the Americas, Europe, and South-East Asia showed an increase in new cases of over 10%,’’ the WHO said.