Food-delivery startup SpoonRocket's site isn't down. Demand is just off the charts

Last night SpoonRocket’s website couldn’t hold up to a crazy traffic spike for its food deliveries in the San Francisco Bay Area — 100 orders every 10 seconds at one point. Tonight, the second night of the promotion, the site is buckling under demand once again.

“Our site is not down,” SpoonRocket co-founder and chief technology officer Anson Tsui said in an interview with VentureBeat. “We are just limiting demand.”

Some orders couldn’t get through as early as 5:03 p.m. Pacific, three minutes after the four-hour “dinner party” offer began. Error messages popped for some orders that didn’t go through. And for those not in the middle of orders were told that SpoonRocket was “experiencing astronomical demand.”

It’s a tough spot to be in for a startup that aimed to do something zany to stand out in the food-delivery business in the Bay Area, with competitors like Sprig taking on funding alongside competitors like Chefler and Munchery. But that’s how things have turned out.

So how does traffic look on the back end?

“We are basically having the same traffic as yesterday,” Tsui said. It seems $1 per meal is just so tempting that yesterday’s down time didn’t turn too many people off.

At least SpoonRocket patched up the website from yesterday so the site didn’t go down in the first 10 minutes of the dinner party. “Yesterday our site was down. Today our website is good to go,” said Tsui. According to him, once SpoonRocket fulfills this round of orders, customers will be able to place orders again. And the price will still be $1.

The best thing hungry San Franciscans can do now, Tsui said, is to “check our social media.”