Technology startup Opinion Yetu, largely credited with conducting Kenya’s first online opinion poll, was down for the majority of yesterday as overwhelming traffic led to their servers crashing.
The high traffic, according to the company, began when the startup decided to relay results from the Kenya election to their followers, leading to traffic increasing ten-fold in just two hours.
As a result, Steven Odunga, chief executive of Opinion Yetu, said the server host ‘hostgator’ blocked their site.
“Our website exceeded usage on a shared server on hostgator, which led to hostgator blocking our site. Efforts to upgrade our hosting were not fruitful as the switch period was too long. We then sought to turn to Amazon which was a faster solution and better service,” he said.
For more than five hours the site remained down with many members demanding results.
It was then the company relayed results over its Facebook and Twitter pages that saw its following on the latter doubling within hours after the company started streaming results.
Opinion Yetu posted on Facebook: “We are currently experiencing server issues following high traffic requests. Please bear with us we look for a quick fix. As it stands, we have reported results for 11688 out of 31982 polling stations. Thanks for your patience!”
Since then the company has been answering its members’ answers on the trickling in of results.
The company says it will be targeting the corporate world after the elections tapping on its ability to analyse, manage, track, and report on their social media monitoring and engagement efforts.
Since the divergence into the corporate world the company has since released a number ofresearch studies including TV social media statistics and print social media statistics.
