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Manila Bulletin devider devider IKEA Family Club Philippines website chokes after launch

IKEA Family Club Philippines website chokes after launch

Published Jul 7, 2021 10:17 am

Swedish furniture retailer IKEA has set July 7, 2021, as Philippines’ IKEA Family Day with the launch of their loyalty club website via https://family.ikea.com.ph/ at the stroke of midnight. The online event aimed to welcome their first 100,000 club members in the first 24 hours and promised lucky enlisters a chance to win one of the three makeover packages worth P50,000.00.

The IKEA family club welcome page

But just like any online promo -- be it an airline seat sale or the eCommerce websites’ monthly promos -- Filipino IKEA fans anticipated the loyalty club website’s launch to the extent that it crashed minutes after it began accepting registrants. A quick check (take note, this is not a hack) on the website’s infrastructure revealed that it is hosted on Microsoft Azure. The website remains online (can still ping on it), but it seems that its database and the system that hosts the website assets got overwhelmed with the sudden influx of visitors (traffic).

As of this writing, the landing page of the IKEA Philippines club website is somehow accessible (keep on refreshing your web browser). However, attempts to sign-up or log in remain futile.

The same incident happened before. In November 2020, the city government of Davao took down the Safe Davao QR code registration website due to high web traffic. The site crashed and has become unusable as more than ten thousand users accessed the website simultaneously.

Around May this year, the website for the online registration of the Philippine Identification System or Philsys stopped working. It crashed in less than an hour after it was made available to the public. More than forty thousand users attempted to use the website simultaneously, making it useless to all.

And now, the Ikea Philippines website for membership registration suffered the same fate. Ikea Philippines did not anticipate the influx of excited Filipino consumers who wanted to win a home makeover package.

The primary cause of traffic-related website crashes is a mismatch between the number of users coming to a website and the capacity of the site’s infrastructure to support this volume of visitors using the website simultaneously. Simply put, the systems used could not match the number of people accessing the website at the same time.

As of this writing, the landing page of the IKEA Philippines club website is somehow accessible (keep on refreshing your web browser). However, attempts to sign-up or log in remain futile. The furniture retailer is set to open its physical and online stores later this year. The IKEA Philippines physical store in the MOA Complex in Pasay City is their largest outlet outside of Sweden.

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