Zomato saw its food ordering service Zomato Order crash on New Years Eve. Zomato was inundated with orders from hungry revelers on 31st December, seeing record levels of orders on the site.
At 7:18 pm on 31st December, Zomato co-founder Pankaj Chaddah tweeted that the company was processing 135 orders a minute.
Processing 135 online orders a minute right now. New year madness @Zomato
— Pankaj Chaddah (@pankajchaddah) December 31, 2015
An hour and a half later, the number of orders had risen to 750 per minute, and Zomato’s servers were creaking under the strain.
Update: Touched 750 orders a minute. Conked off. Switching off online ordering. Restoring servers so that you can call restaurants directly.
— Zomato India (@ZomatoIN) December 31, 2015
Zomato was forced to briefly switch off its online ordering. The company got its servers back up so that customers could still contact restaurants directly to place orders.
Zomato has been a late entrant into the food ordering game, having started operations in September 2015 when players like Foodpanda, Swiggy and TinyOwl were already deeply entrenched in the system. It appears to have made major strides since its inception, having been built on the back of Zomato’s restaurant listing business. The food ordering business on a whole in India is currently facing some turbulence, with Zomato, TinyOwl and Foodpanda having all laid off employees in 2015.