Nigerian shoppers crash Jumia website with Error 503

Posted by Felix Okoli on Friday November 28, 2014 at 10:40:14:

It seems Jumia Nigeria's black Friday deals were a success after all as the website has witnessed a lot of traffic from Nigerian shoppers to the extent that it went offline. However this short term success might affect the company's ability to make more sales since the site has just gone offline. Didn't Jumia anticipate for this? Didn't they get a better web hosting service?

I just visited the site at 10.30 am Nigerian Time on Black Friday and couldn't even get to to the home page. It was online a few hours ago when I last checked but after about 2 hrs of Nigerians probably just waking up and flooding the site, it's gone offline.

A visit to Jumia Nigeria's website displays the following:

503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

What really causes a "503 Service Temporarily Unavailable" error on websites? I did a bit of research about it on some tech blogs and found out that it's caused by either the website having too much traffic or it's in maintenance mode. Either way, the fact that it's temporarily unavailable means that it's only going to continue like that for the short term and would get back online after a few minutes or hours. I hope it doesn't take the whole of Black Friday before Jumia webmasters get the site up and running again.

Good news Just as I was finishing this blog post, Jumia's website is back online again and it took less than 5 minutes. I think they were really prepared for this year's Black Friday sales.

Shop on Jumia