Both HomeShopping and Daraz suffer down time on White and Black Friday

Both, Daraz.pk and HomeShopping.pk, suffered from server issues in the initial hours of the “Black Friday” sales, much to the dismay of the hundreds of thousands of people waiting for the first big Black Friday in Pakistan.

Black Friday is the Friday after Thanksgiving that is celebrated in much of the Western world as an unofficial start to the Christmas shopping season, and retailers use this opportunity to boost their sales while putting a lot of products on sale. This time, Pakistani online retailer Daraz decided to jump on the bandwagon, introducing Black Friday in Pakistan and HomeShopping.pk followed suit with their own variaton titled “White Friday”. But for now, this initiative seemed to have backfired a little because within the initial hour, both the sites have experienced some serious down times.

As soon as the clock ticked midnight, users flocked to these sites to get access to the best deals but all that traffic seems to have caught them off their guard. When we tried accessing these sites, we were greeted with these errors,

The tradition of celebrating Black Friday is pretty new in South Asia right now, and specifically in Pakistan. Here, a lot of people are still unsure as to whether we should adopt this Western tradition too or not, considering our religious views of Friday as being a holy day.

Daraz Screenshot Credits: Abdul Basit