MAS Site Overwhelmed
The official price and package list for this year’s MAS Travel Fair (2006) was scheduled to be released by MAS today at midnight. With the amount of interest that this event draws from both local and overseas, it is only too obvious that their site was going to experience a spike in traffic. I was wondering earlier whether MAS had had the foresight to make provisions for the circumstance. I found out first hand when I tried to get into the site.
And the answer is a very unfortunate, NO. When I tried to get onto their site (both MAS’s official site, their alternative domain, and the MAS Travel Fair site), I was greeted with either a ‘connection refused’, ‘time out’, or ‘failed to contact’ message on Firefox. On Internet Explorer, it totally failed to locate the server. Do we see something wrong with this picture?
I am very disappointed that inspite of the obvious, the people at MAS had not made any preparations (or at least none that are immediately apparent) whatsoever. If there wasn’t for the feeling of dejavu, I would have perhaps given them the benefit of doubt. However, following the Air Asia’s two million ticket giveaway late last year, I figured that MAS would have at least learned something from its rival’s mistakes. The organisers are naive to think that their servers could handle the increased load.
The resulting downtime is going to hurt them some. The Travel Fair will still go on but it will have to do without any useful information that MAS had been promising over the past week. Also, with their main site down, they are going to lose some business from online bookings as well as taking another blow to their battered corporate image.
Just out of curiousity, I looked at the websites of some of the more popular travel agents to see if they were experiencing similar accidental Denial of Service attacks caused by overwhelming public interest. That and to see if I could not gather some additional information about the available offers.
While some of them spotted the MAS Travel Fair banner indicating that they were participating (e.g. Reliance Travels with details of their participation participation and Corporate Information Travel), there wasn’t any additional information to be had. More likely than not, the travel agents themselves are only now cobbling together the packages that they are going to sell and pretifying everything for publication. Whatever the reason, I didn’t manage to find any additional details to confirm or disprove the insider scoop I gave you earlier.
Stay tuned for more information. I’ll share it as soon as I get it ;)
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Boredworkers.com Update
SPAM
boo_licious Said,
February 16, 2006 @ 5:41 am
Malaysia tak boleh! So sad, as I am sure they will be swamped since it’s headlines on today’s Star.
Otto Said,
February 16, 2006 @ 7:17 am
There was Proton and then there was MAS….. why am I not the least surprised that they failed to foresee the necessasity to prime up their servers beforehand?
Oh let me see, yes… I rememeber… It is because they f**ked up big time when I took their flight to London last March! First and last experience flying with MAS for sure. Two hours delay on departure from KLIA. Where was some sweeties and goodies to pacify customers that paid RM3600 for their sardine packed seats in economy? Nothing!
And luggage delay for more than an hour as well. Yes, on the same freakin’ flight… An already long journey (12 hrs average) is made pure hell and longer due to stupidity of a few.
I’ve flown SIA long haul for more than 10 years and it has never happened. Not even ONCE. Excellent service all the way.
I don’t even want to get started on the cheap flights offered by AirAsia.
Perhaps they should hire that AirAsia’s CEO to manage MAS for a change?
I’d say if MAS keeps making a lost, shut it down. That’ll teach them lot to buck up.
gbyeow Said,
February 16, 2006 @ 10:36 am
boo_licious: It is unfortunate but true. Its been nearly half a day and they still haven’t managed to get their site back up and running. Additionally, The Star online is also suffering from its front page publication of MAS Travel Fair 2006. As people start hitting dead ends from the MAS site, the flow of traffic will slowly be diverted to The Star on the assumption that they may know something that the public doesn’t. I suppose at the end of the day, it is nice to see a spike in traffic. I for one am certainly enjoying it :)
Otto: I’ve only ever been on one flight with MAS and that was to Penang from KL on a business trip. Lets just say that I took three flights for a round-trip. You might be asking how I managed to squeeze three flights into two. Well, the first plane out had to turn back due to technical difficulties. And this was the first time I ever flew. Thankfully it didn’t give me aviophobia (fear of flying).
As for the MAS making a loss bit. Well, I’ll refrain from comment at the moment. Lots of variables involved and its not as simple as it may seem to the public.
sanjiv Said,
February 16, 2006 @ 11:37 am
by, funny you should mention that MAS should’ve learnt from AIR ASIA’s online giveaway last year. I was told by an MAS Manager that they recruited the guy who organises and manages AIR ASIA’s ticket sales (or something akin to that). Bottom line, same guy, same mistakes…
Wingz Said,
February 16, 2006 @ 11:48 am
they will never learn ….
Simonsays Said,
February 16, 2006 @ 12:47 pm
I think that the problem with the bad website access lies in the absence of & poor management of server load-balancing, monitoring of processes in the OS, webservers, applications & databases, as well as in the lack of knowledge of the production team members in handling such a huge number of concurrent users… It’s probably a complicated mess that the developers and sysadmins of MAS & their outsourcing partners are finding themselves in, even as of this time of posting, as probably for the first time they are having to deal with such a high traffic volume. Having worked in an enterprise development environment before, and seeing the hodgepodge of technologies poorly cobbled together for enterprise use - and that was only in an intranet environment - I would probably be the only poster here who would sympathise with the techies involved in this. They probably had fielded a request to upper management for more resources sometime much earlier in anticipation of a day like today but some pointy-haired dude at the top probably said, “No need, I’m sure you guys will probably work things out with our current resources. Why, when I was at your age…”.
gbyeow Said,
February 17, 2006 @ 9:52 am
sanjiv: Same guy, same problems, same boot! Haha. Whoever they hired is probably making a bundle out of the mess.
Wingz: Sad but true.
Simonsays: They are having load balancing and concurrent user access problems, yes. That’s indicative by the connection refused message where the webserver reaches its maximum load. However, that’s sometimes the fault of users as well for trying to open multiple pages and hogging the resources.
I noticed a database fault while navigating their site yesterday. I now know that they are using websphere as a backend. Having said that, it was a mistake to let IBM be their sole supplier (last I heard) and monopolise their IT needs. While IBM products are good, they are also typically expensive. Costs are very obviously going to go through the roof. In any situation where there’s a monopoly, its going to result in a painful experience for the guy holding the short end of the stick.