Zomato Sends Users Notifications About Orders They Never Made, Leading To Hilarity And Heartbreak

OfficeChai Team

Zomato’s users were greeted with a surprise in their inboxes today morning. Turns out some unexpected food was coming their way.

In an industry which until recently was offering Buy One Get One free offers, and 100% cashbacks, some free food could’ve been thought as a natural extension to quickly garner some more users.

But people were wary.

And some honest folks thought they were receiving SMSes meant from someone else, and tweeted to Zomato about what was happening.

It is 2017 after all – if you could have fake news, why couldn’t you have fake orders?

Zomato was especially enthusiastic for some users, sending them the same message thrice in quick succession.

 

But some eagle-eyed customers figured out what was going on – Zomato was simply resending SMSes for ordered they’d made over a year ago.

 

Zomato finally figured out what was going on, and sent out apology SMSes. The company said that the messages had been sent because of a technical glitch, which had since been resolved.

But the apology SMS reached some users who’d never received any messages in the first place, leading to even more confusion.

But people were mostly heartbroken at not having received any free food at all.

Some joked that this flurry of SMSes was a reaction to the launch of Google’s food delivery app Areo yesterday, which could compete with Zomato and eat (heh) into its margins.

But some good might’ve come out of the whole incident at all. Someone thought this could become a feature – if Facebook memories could be a thing, why not Zomato memories? Get on it, Zomato. 😛

This isn’t the first time an Indian company has sent SMSes en masse to users about products that they didn’t buy. Last year, Myntra had spammed thousands of its users with notifications for products that they hadn’t bought. It turned out that the glitch was thanks to a simple variable name change. Zomato hasn’t quite revealed what went on behind the scenes, but given its propensity to blog extensively about its inner goings on, one expects that there will be more information soon. But for now, Zomato users have realized no matter what SMS notifications might say, there are no free lunches in the world.