Konga Sales Flops As Website Crashes Yakata on Black Friday

Editor’s Note: This post is by Tayo Olufuwa, Co-Founder of Jobs-In-Nigeria and Certified Ethical Hacker. You can follow him on twitter at @olufuwatayo.

November 29 according to Konga.com is supposed to be the Yakata (to fall down in a big way) sales day, with plans to incredibly slash prices of products being sold on its website but  it seems the plan may have just fallen down yakata-ly.

A lot of users including me have been waiting for the ‘yakata’ sales so we can get unbelievable discounts on products unfortunately because of the traffic surge this has result in what appears to be a co-incidental DDOS (Distributed Denial Of Service ) attack the website is down at the time of writing this post 10:05 am (GMT+1).

There has been reactions on their Facebook page as fans has been expressing concern over the issue.

Konga down

Konga appears to be using magneto cart software and being a dynamic portal hosted on apache webserver according to builtwith.com/konga.com, unfortunately apache is a beast for huge traffic websites and can’t effectively handle traffic spike.
Solutions could be moving to nginx + Varnish or installing HAProxy or better still just using a web application firewall that has load balancing like incapsula or cloudflare.

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This recent outage shows that either Konga wasn’t prepared for this spike at all or they underestimated the traffic they were going to receive, by now Konga would have missed lots of sales today as customers would have gone to other websites.
With this outage one could only guess that a planned DDOS could definitely take konga.com out for a whole day or weeks.

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