A significant amount of change has been seen in a couple of years. The way India’s shops and trades the e-commerce world has taken over the generation. A sharp growth has already reached the biggest firms in India like Flipkart, Amazon the past few years. Every year Flipkart, a popular e-commerce website of India organizes flash sales and offer heavy discounts on various products. These sales generally start from midnights and gain a huge amount of traffic in it. But the 2015 edition became questionable after Flipkart’s site collapsed due to heavy traffic during the sale at midnight of 14th October 2015.
As soon as the sale was about to go live, the website crashed. Due to this Flipkart had to face a lot of criticism. Due to this, Flipkart had to face huge losses and traffic dropped drastically. Punit Soni(Chief Product Officer) of Flipkart narrated the whole incident in an interview about the reasons for site crash.
Soni told, the senior team had to back off as this event was quite doubtful and ultimately they had to rely on the engineering team. According to them, some unknown source was reportedly bringing traffic from the region outside of India. This fake traffic resulted in traffic to go down drastically, therefore, users had to face issues while accessing the website. People were left disappointed as they were excited about midnights sale and heavy discount on smartphones and other products.
The engineers of Flipkart were unable to stop this outside attack, all they did was to wait for the traffic to clear up. Later at night, they stopped the traffic coming from outside. In this process, they had already lost a big amount of revenues. Soni recalls, later everything cleared up and the website was up again.
