High demand for food weighs heavy on delivery apps

KOLKATA: Sandhir Mundra from Bhowanipore kept trying to order food on all the delivery apps on Monday night. But despite an hour-long struggle, he couldn’t get through to a single restaurant.

Mundra was not the only one. 31st dinner plans of many went awry with the food-delivery apps either failing to take orders or complete their services in some parts of the city after 9pm. Almost all the apps had started slowing down in processing orders. But all the top three operators — Swiggy, Zomato and UberEats — blamed it on the restaurants’ inability to cater to the huge rush. A Swiggy spokesperson told TOI, “Although an unprecedented number of people turned to our app to order food, we faced no disruption in our services pan-India, including Kolkata.”

“Last night, we were helpless as none of restaurants in my territory was allowing to process an order. It was quite natural that many orders were rejected or showed a huge waiting time,” said Mrinal Panda, a food delivery boy of a leading app. Explaining the reason, a technical executive of a delivery app said, “This jolt happens when an excessive number of orders are received at a particular time. It clogs all the channels. A similar thing happened during the Puja.”

An official of the Hotel and Restaurants’ Association of Eastern India said restaurants found it difficult to cater to the orders placed on the apps. “They were overworked and crowded and couldn’t do justice to the online orders,” said the official.

Queries to other food delivery apps did not elicit any official response till midnight.