Case Study: County of San Luis Obispo achieves equitable, reliable COVID-19 vaccine scheduling with Cloudflare Waiting Room

County of San Luis Obispo Ensures Equitable COVID-19 Vaccine Access with Project Fair Shot

The County of San Luis Obispo, which serves 277,000 residents and operates three COVID-19 vaccination clinics, faced severe traffic surges when appointment slots opened each Thursday at 9 AM—about 23,000 people would try to book at once. While the county used Google Forms to scale its scheduling, backend scripts couldn’t close slots fast enough under heavy load, causing site outages, accidental double-bookings and an unfair advantage for faster internet users.

The county implemented Cloudflare’s Project Fair Shot Waiting Room to queue visitors and admit them in controlled groups (about 200 at a time), giving the Forms-based system time to process bookings. The change kept scheduling pages available during 23,000-user surges, eliminated double-bookings, provided transparent first-come-first-served access, and received positive citizen feedback while continuing to support the county’s later lottery-based scheduling.

County of San Luis Obispo

Tyler Penney

Web Services Administrator