Food-tech platforms Swiggy and Zomato had witnessed a spike in orders during New Year’s Eve as many celebrated the new year indoors due to Omicron.

The Omicron Covid-19 variant scare, night curfews and a ban on parties in various States contributed to the high number of people celebrating the new year indoors.

Chennai had imposed restrictions on December 31, 2021, and blocked roads and banned vehicles except for in emergency situations.

Due to indoor celebrations, both Zomato and Swiggy crossed over 2 million orders a day. Zomato touched 7,100 orders per minute while Swiggy was receiving 9,000 orders per minute at around 8:20 pm.

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Swiggy Instamart also witnessed a spike, with more than 12,000 orders, and so did Zomato-backed Blinkit. Deepinder Goyal, Founder and CEO of Zomato, shared the breakdown of orders made via Blinkit which came out to 1,30,000 litres of soda, 11,943 ice packs, 4,884 jars of dips, 6,712 tubs of ice creams and 28,240 packs of instant popcorn.

The spike in online ordering led to UPI digital payment infrastructure failures which caused problems for customers and companies alike. Deepinder Goyal, Founder and CEO of Zomato, said, “UPI success rate is drastically down across all UPI apps (40 per cent success rate right now, down from 70 per cent+). Will affect orders per minute negatively.”