Poor England boss Fabio Capello and his parade (charade?) of players – not only have they let down an entire nation of football-loving optimists but they are causing travel sites to crash.
UK-based online travel agency TravelRepublic says its website crashed on Monday this week after seeing a 33% jump in traffic compared to the same day last week.
The disastrous end to the England football team’s limp showing at the FIFA World Cup in South Africa is believed to have seen a sudden surge in consumers looking to escape with late deals.
TravelRepublic admits it was unprepared for the increase in traffic – pattern which eventually led to the site having its best single day with visitor numbers for “several months”.
IT director Chris Waite explains why the technology failed on this occasion:
“The crash was caused by our own bespoke visitor tracking software which was not able to cope with the load (slow write times to the database).
“We had to disable some of the visitor tracking data to get the site back online. Internally we call this the ‘Go Faster Button’, it strips away all the nice-to-have data (logging etc) to make the site go faster but leaves the customer experience unchanged apart from being faster.”
Interestingly, website crashes ordinarily do not lead to travel companies explaining the inner workings of their systems to the outside world.
But Waite continues:
“It seems our database server wasn’t able to cope with the number of visits per second when inserting rows in  to the visit detail table. We’ve now partitioned this functionality across two servers, so we should be ready for at least double the load now.”
So now you all know what to do…
Related posts:
- Shock stats: Americans searching twice as much as Brits for World Cup flights
- TravelRepublic victory gives hope to UK online travel startups
- Skyscanner taps into FIFA World Cup 2010 with widgets and content
- FlyBe website collapses – customers annoyed and in the dark
- British Airways website oversleeps by six hours
Not surprising. People want to forget about the last game. It was embarrassing. I was impressed with the passion Argentinean players brought into the game, while Germans were enthusiastic and organised. What did British team add to the game? I did not see any ardour or attitude. My young neighbour gets more joy out of playing football.
Any way, going on holiday is a great way to get away from negative emotions.
I guess now the price of summer holidays will go up. Pity, as I was looking for a bargain.
surely their site should have been able to handle this traffic? PErhaps it’s just a cleverly leaked publicity stunt……