Zomato
In picture: Screenshots of backdated Zomato orders coming to users.Screenshots

Popular food-ordering app and platform Zomato was hit by a glitch on Friday, April 14, that caused it to send out confirmation messages to users in India — particularly Bengaluru — for orders going back to about one whole year. The glitch continued to send the messages for several hours before Zomato rectified it and issued an apology on Twitter. 

The messages were initially construed as spam by several Zomato users, and given that India does see a large amount of spamming, many of them took to Twitter to get the message across to the app and those running it that they had been receiving messages of order confirmation from anywhere between a few months to almost a year ago. 

Levity, then 'heartbreak'

One common refrain among many Zomato users, including some food bloggers, was that there was "free food" coming. Some people even took to Twitter to say as much, tagging the Zomato official handle. International Business Times, India, contacted some food bloggers in Bengaluru, who also said they had received the messages, and that they had tried to contact Zomato. 

Here are some examples: 

However, Zomato India later took to Twitter to set the record straight and inform its users that a glitch was to blame for their troubles, and that it had been fixed. It said: "We are very sorry about the SMS some of you received earlier today. It was a technical glitch, which has been resolved."

Zomato spokesperson Naina Sahni Parnaik confirmed the glitch to IBTimes India, saying in reply to an email query: "There was a bug that triggered SMS messages to some of our users for old orders. We've fixed it."

Expectedly, what followed was heartbreak, and users did not seem shy in letting Zomato know about it, possibly because the thought of getting free food over the extended weekend — on account of the Good Friday holiday — was quite enticing. 

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