eRL Crashed Again on Nov 5 — Can You Trust a Digital Licence System That Keeps Failing?

The online revenue licence system (eRL 2.0) went down again on November 5, this time for a 'critical infrastructure update,' pushing people back to Divisional Secretariat counters to renew. This isn't new — it's gone offline more than once since launching in 2023, including a multi-day outage in September and another in July last year. One side says this is just growing pains: digitising a country-wide system is hard, and when it works, eRL is genuinely faster than the old counter queues ever were. The other side says a system that keeps failing has no business being the only easy option — if your licence lapses on exactly the day it's down, that's the government's failure, not yours, and there should be an automatic grace period written into the rules instead of hoping the clerk at the counter is lenient. Has your revenue licence ever lapsed because eRL was down on the day you needed it, and did you get hit with a fine or extra hassle for it? Should there be a legal grace period whenever the system itself is the one that's broken? ඔයාගේ වාහනේ ලයිසන් renew කරන්න ගියාම eRL down වෙලා කරදරයක් වුණාද? කොහොමද ඒක විසඳගත්තේ?