Zomato, Swiggy hit by hour-long technical glitch on April 6

Food delivery apps Zomato and Swiggy reported a nationwide outage on Wednesday.

Both the platforms witnessed technical glitches and were unresponsive for almost an hour.

Downdetector, a platform that collects status reports from a series of sources, recorded about 3,619 reports of outage against Zomato at 2:05 PM and about 771 reports of outage against Swiggy at around 2:21 PM.

According to the sources, the outage was caused by Amazon Web Services (AWS), a cloud-services platform, which runs both platforms.

Though Swiggy and Zomato are working now, some customers reported that the issue has not been solved completely and they are not able to place orders and there are payment related issues.

There was an operational issue related to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Singapore).

According to the AWS Service Health Dashboard, the issue has been resolved and the service is operating normally.

“Starting at 1:23 AM PDT (Pacific Daylight Time), some EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) instances experienced a loss of power and some EBS  (Amazon Elastic Block Store) volumes experienced degraded performance within a single Availability Zone (apse1-az1) in the AP-SOUTHEAST-1 Region,” said the AWS Service Health Dashboard.

“Power was quickly restored to the affected instances and EBS volumes and by 1:40 AM PDT, the majority of EC2 instances and EBS volumes had fully recovered.

"By 2:05 AM PDT, the vast majority of affected EC2 instances and EBS volumes had fully recovered.

"Some RDS (Amazon Relational Database Service) databases were also affected by the event, and recovered after power was restored.

"Customers with affected EC2 instances and EBS volumes were notified via the Personal Health Dashboard.

"The issue has been resolved and the service is operating normally.”

The outage happened during lunch hours when many consumers order their food online.

Many customers took to Twitter to complain about the technical glitch.

Some customers are  complaining about payment getting deducted but orders not being placed.

“Placed an order from Domino’s Pizza through your app. Payment got deducted. I called Domino’s they said we haven’t received any such order yet. Neither the chat works nor the customer care is picking up the call,” tweeted a Swiggy customer.

Swiggy admitted that there was a technical issue with the platform.

“We apologise for the long delay we are currently facing due to a technical glitch.

"This is not usual with us and our best minds are working on it to resolve it at the earliest.

"Please bear with us. If your issue doesn't get resolved please reach out to us and we will be happy to help,” said Swiggy Cares, the official support handle of Swiggy.

“What a pathetic app and service, it is 3.06 PM and also availed Pro membership. This was not expected. This is a worst service from Zomato,” tweeted a customer.

Zomato admitted that there was a technical issue.

“We were facing a temporary glitch. Thanks to our techmates, we are back up and running.

"We are sorry for any inconvenience caused in the interim and hope to serve you better in the future,” said Zomato care, the official Zomato support page.

Founded in 2014, Swiggy is India’s leading on-demand convenience platform.

It connects consumers to over 1,85,000 restaurant partners and stores in over 500 cities.

Its express delivery service Instamart is present in 21 cities.

It has about 300,000 partners.

Launched in 2010, Zomato’s technology platform connects customers, restaurant partners and delivery partners, serving their multiple needs.

Zomato had said it had delivered 239 million orders between April 2020 and March 2021.

During FY21, 32 million average MAU (monthly active users) visited Zomato’s platform.

It is present in 525 cities in India, with almost 150,000 active food delivery restaurant listings.

It had about 170,000 active delivery partners.

The technical glitch has happened at a time when the Competition Commission of India (CCI) has called for a Director General (DG) investigation into alleged anti-competitive behaviour on the part of food delivery platforms Zomato and Swiggy.

CCI has asked the DG to probe the conflict of interest that arises out of Swiggy and Zomato listing their own cloud kitchen brands exclusively on their platforms.

The other issues include entry barriers created to prevent new entrants into the food delivery market and price parity arrangements by which restaurants are not allowed to maintain lower prices for food items.

The order was passed on the basis of information received by the CCI from the National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI).

The NRAI, which represents over 500,000 restaurants across the country, had asked the CCI to investigate the two firms for allegedly providing priority to some restaurants.