IT’S STUBBED GRUB
Customers fed up with the Web site’s outages
Seamless and Grubhub are having trouble staying online — again.
The food-delivery sites, run by parent company Grubhub, have lately suffered a slew of major service outages — at least half a dozen in the last two months alone — with several lasting more than an hour each.
Most recent was Thursday night, which sparked a barrage of Seamless customer complaints on Twitter as the site appeared to be down for more than an hour.
“Sometimes your site + app make me want to punch someone,” fumed Paul Zonis, a New York-based tech exec. “Been trying to place order for 10+ min and both are failing!”
“Sorry for the huge inconvenience!” Seamless tweeted to another irate customer more than an hour later, after the outage was finally resolved. “We were experiencing technical difficulties earlier. We are up and running now!”
The slip-ups could soon prove annoying to more than just hungry homebodies. In the third quarter of last year, Grubhub Chief Executive Matt Maloney admitted that service “hiccups” cost the company $1 million in revenue, and cut year-over-year growth in food orders by 1.5 percentage points.
Asked by The Post about the latest hiccups, a Grubhub spokeswoman declined to comment on “the materiality of any outages that occurred after our most recent earnings call,” which took place Oct. 27.
Those have included an Oct. 30 incident when many customers were left in the dark for nearly four hours on a Sunday evening.
That, as it happens, was during Game 5 of the World Series — a period of peak de- mand for pizzas, burgers and wings that likely overwhelmed the company’s Web servers, according to experts.
Grubhub was founded in 2004, and “companies of that vintage traditionally have legacy tools that need to be up- graded,” says tech consultant Shelly Palmer. “It’s hard to do and it’s expensive.”
It’s possible that Grubhub “made a business decision that it’s OK to be down a certain number of minutes or hours in a given time period,” according to Palmer.
Indeed, server reliability is something that can, to a large extent, be purchased, notes Vasant Dhar, a professor of data science at NYU’s Stern School of Business.
“It shouldn’t be that much of a big deal to plug and play your systems at this stage of development,” Dhar said.
The glitches are the latest headache for CEO Maloney, who last month sent the Chicago-based company’s shares tumbling 5 percent after he emailed an anti-Trump rant to employees that hacked off company workers and customers alike.
Meanwhile, rival food-delivery services appear to be gaining ground on Seamless and Grubhub. UberEats, a food-delivery app launched just a year ago, has logged 34,200 users a day during the past 90 days, according to Apptopia.
That’s uncomfortably close to the 39,700 a day racked up by the 7-year-old Grubhub app during the same time frame, according to the app tracker.