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Fix Your Bike website crashes due to massive demand – but first 50,000 vouchers snapped up in hoursHalfords Fix Your Bike

Fix Your Bike website crashes due to massive demand – but first 50,000 vouchers snapped up in hours

Government initiative went live to public just before midnight but many were left frustrated
by Simon_MacMichael
Wed, Jul 29, 2020 12:33
6

The Fix Your Bike website, through which people can obtain vouchers worth £50 towards the cost of repairing a long-neglected bike, crashed as soon as it opened yesterday evening – but even so, the first 50,000 vouchers were snapped up quickly.

A message on the scheme’s website this morning reads: “Thank you for your interest in the Fix Your Bike Voucher Scheme. There are no vouchers available right now.

“Vouchers are being released gradually to reflect the capacity of the bike repairers signed up to the scheme. More vouchers will be made available as soon as possible.”

> Fix Your Bike voucher scheme opens to public – here’s how to get one and what to do with it

In all, 500,000 vouchers are due to be released to people in England, with a limit of two per household, and the vouchers are being distributed in stages both to avoid overwhelming bike retailers and repairers as well as to assess public enthusiasm for the scheme.

There’s no doubting the latter, with the Fix Your Bike website – hosted by the Energy Saving Trust – unable to cope with demand when it went live at 2345 hours yesterday evening.

According to posts on social media, it wasn’t until around 4am that people were able to start registering for vouchers – and it appears that within a few hours, all of the first 50,000 to be released had gone.

Adding to some people’s frustration is that the way the scheme operates with some bike repair service providers – including Halfords, the UK’s biggest bike retailer – means that they had booked their bikes in for assessment before obtaining a voucher.

That means, in the event they were unsuccessful, they go ahead and get the bike repaired without benefiting from the discount, or they face a lengthy wait and possibly more frustration when the next batch of vouchers is released.

In the meantime, many would-be punters took to Twitter to vent their frustration.

It wasn’t just people hoping to get their hands on a voucher who were frustrated, either – this independent bike shop waiting for the scheme to launch wasn’t too happy either.

If you did miss out on a voucher, here’s a reminder that you can always use the Dr Bike pop-up service – Google “Dr Bike” and your location to find out when and where there is a session near you.

Fix Your Bike
Simon MacMichael

Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.

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6 comments

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markieteeee | 4 years ago
0 likes

For those who wanted to give it a go, it's working again (Thursday 30th July at 11am)

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huntswheelers | 4 years ago
0 likes

We never bothered to register...ACT tried to "encourage" us but with the calendar booked until well after the kids head back to school,plus seeing how the red tape was on this ...it was decided to leave the school bikes, clunkers and hassle to others to sort out....and also as Johnson's govt have handed responsibility over to an underfunded charity to manage.....what could possibly go wrong?...

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RoubaixCube | 4 years ago
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I was awake till 4am anyway so kept refreshing the page. The site was pretty much dead the moment the scheme went live. 

Im very curious as to how many people actually managed to register for the vouchers. Went to bed at 4. woke up at 11 and the site told me all vouchers had been claimed.

I strongly believe that the people who managed to register for the first wave probably got multiple vouchers  because they had to refresh the page so many times to keep it going.

I guess the moral of the story here is "you snooze, you lose"

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mdavidford replied to RoubaixCube | 4 years ago
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I strongly suspect that hardly anyone has managed to successfully register for vouchers.

No-one has actually come out and said that the first batch is used up. The holding page just says that 'there are no vouchers are available right now' - it doesn't say whether that's because they've issued all the ones they intended to, or because they're desperately trying to work out how to improve their infrastructure to cope with the demand. I'm guessing the latter.

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Nick T replied to RoubaixCube | 4 years ago
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My daughter woke me up at 4:20, I loaded the page up no problem. Step by step instructions, choose which shop you'll use, give details of yourself and your bike, they'll email you a code which you claim back the £50  with. When I woke up properly at 6:30 the site was dead as a dodo

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brooksby | 4 years ago
2 likes

Maybe they did hide the vouchers inside the wrappers of energy gel packs?

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