PRESS-RELEASE
The developers of the booking.uz.gov.ua website at Unit addressed the Head of Ukrzaliznytsya with an open letter. In an interview with Censor.net, Yevhen Kravtsov claimed that the online system had failed to operate under heavy load during the New Year holidays: “There has been a system failure. It couldn’t sustain the work under heavy load”.
“The software was running and is continuing to run properly. The delays with the ticket sale online were caused artificially. First of all, the holiday tickets were made available on the very last moment and secondly, the server equipment, located in the data-center of Ukrzaliznytsya (Main Information and Computing Center) was outdated, leading to bottlenecks.” – the letter said.
The developer company has made several appeals to the management of Ukrzaliznytsya in the form of official letters, emphasizing on the need to update and modernize the hardware systems. However, these appeals have been ignored. The fact of the systems being outdated has been confirmed by the Main Information and Computing Center as well.
By making such claims, Yevhen Kravtsov is trying to manipulate public opinion on the situation in order to cover up the real state of things at Ukrzaliznytsya and justify the procurement of a new system (a copied version of the old one) and the booking.uz.gov.ua website for a total sum of 21,4 million UAH (https://prozorro.gov.ua/tender/UA-2018-10-26-001603-c).
In turn, UNIT informs that it is doing everything in its power to maintain the stability of the online tickets’ sale system.
Here is the original text of the appeal letter with attachments from the developers:
Dear Mr. Kravtsov,
On the previous week a new interview (https://bit.ly/2Yxe9Me) was published in the mass media, where you made a claim about “a critical online tickets’ sale and payment system failure”. As developers of the following system at Unit, we would like to address you and the civil society by making a public claim that no such faults were detected. The software was running and is continuing to run properly. The delays with the ticket sale online were caused artificially. First of all, the holiday tickets were made available on the very last moment and secondly, the server equipment, located in the data-center of Ukrzaliznytsya (Main Information and Computing Center (Further on: MICC)) was outdated, leading to bottlenecks. This information can be proved by the letter #36/3930, which we received from MICC as of 10.12.2018 (attached below).
We would like to draw your attention to the letters from 04.10.2016 #04/101016, 21.06.2018 #05/210618, 16.07.2018 #02/160718, 03.10.2018 #03/031018 and 06.12.2018 #03/061218 (attached), in which we officially appealed to the Ukrzaliznytsya and emphasized on the importance of updating the hardware (server) systems. However, these letters were ignored with no further reaction on the part of Ukrzaliznytsya.
Regarding your claim, that “the electronic system of online tickets sale needs to be thoroughly reworked and enhanced”, allegedly in order to avoid speculations – we would like to inform that we had sent the technical requirements for this project to Ukrzaliznytsya a year before. The mentioned requirements had been decided on and approved by the respective structures inside of Ukrzaliznytsya. However, no further action has been taken to implement this project to this day!
Thus, the information you shared on the interview regarding the work of the online tickets sale does not correspond to reality and resembles an attempt to manipulate public opinion in order to cover up the real state of things at Ukrzaliznytsya as well as to justify the procurement of a new system (a copied version of the old one) and the website booking.uz.gov.ua (https://bit.ly/2ZNEFO6).
On our part, the team of experts at UNIT is doing its best to maintain the stable work of the system. We kindly ask you to stop the manipulations and the disinformation campaign on the ‘problems’ with the electronic tickets at Ukrzaliznytsya.
