Bleak moments in Black Friday frenzy
System problems stymied shoppers and blocked sales
Online retailers were caught with their pants down by the shopping frenzy that gripped South Africa on Black Friday last week. Falling on the day after the US holiday of Thanksgiving, and marking the beginning of Christmas shopping there, the idea has rapidly caught on in South Africa. Most local online retailers now offer markdowns on a wide range of products and have seen it become their biggest shopping day of the year. However, just minutes after midnight on Friday last week, South African shoppers found they couldn't get into websites such as CNA, takealot.com and DionWired.Many payments made through Nedbank could not be processed, and gifting site NetFlorist saw a slowdown on its site as traffic intensified. Takealot.com co-CEO and chief technology officer Willem van Biljon explained: "Our website relies on a technology called Kubernetes to manage network traffic and hardware scaling ... The enormous increase in traffic exposed an unknown bug in the component of Kubernetes tha...
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