Visitors to the state's vaccine appointment website were greeted Thursday by an error message featuring a confused-looking orange octopus. Screenshot | State House News Service

After the frustration and chaos of the Thursday morning failure of the state vaccine appointment website, the Baker administration said 60,000 appointments were booked after all and passed along a statement in which a vendor whose technology has caused problems elsewhere took the blame.

In an unsigned statement, PrepMod, a Maryland-based online clinic management and appointment scheduling system, said it took “full responsibility” for the website problems and vowed that it would not happen again. The cause of the problem, the company said, was “a sudden and unprecedented surge in traffic to the site.”

“Unfortunately, the system did not scale fast enough to accommodate the increased volume,” the company said.

The Baker administration said PropMod addressed the issues and the state was pressure testing it to check the vendor’s work.

PropMod, which said it is “the state’s biggest online appointment vendor,” has been blamed for problems with vaccine distribution and appointment scheduling in other states over the last month and a half.

In California, the software was blamed for sometimes limiting access to vaccine doses and causing hiccups in scheduling appointments at community vaccination sites, the LA Times reported last month. Pennsylvania public health officials called the software “cumbersome” earlier this month after dealing with things like double-booked appointments and ineligible people getting vaccinated, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

Baker’s COVID-19 Command Center said all appointments next week at the Fenway Park, Gillette Stadium, Danvers, Natick, Dartmouth and Springfield vaccination sites were booked, but that “a small number of appointments for other locations will be posted over the next several days” at pharmacies and regional collaborative sites.

Following the Thursday morning failure of the state’s vaccine appointment website as 1 million more people became eligible to get themselves protected against the deadly coronavirus, Gov. Charlie Baker took to the airwaves to pledge that the issue would be fixed.

“My hair’s on fire about the whole thing. I can’t even begin to tell you how pissed off I am,” Baker said on GBH’s “Boston Public Radio” when asked about the website debacle just after noon. He later added, “This is not satisfactory … it’s awful. It’s going to get fixed and I’m going to work very hard to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Heavy traffic torpedoed the state’s vaccination scheduling website as more than 70,000 appointments were to be made available at 8 a.m. to the seniors and people with multiple health complications who newly qualified for a vaccine Thursday morning. The state said it had not added those appointments to the system by the time it failed.

People visiting the vaxfinder.mass.gov website after 8 a.m. Thursday were met with the message that “this application crashed.” Visitors were advised to try again later. The website was back up at about 10 a.m., though some people reported persistent troubles with it.

When Baker announced Wednesday that people 65 years old or older, the residents and staff of low-income housing for seniors, and people with two or more health conditions that put them at higher risk for hospitalization or death would be able to start booking vaccination appointments at 8 a.m. Thursday, it represented roughly a doubling of the number of people eligible for the limited number of vaccine doses.