07/01/2026
A quick breakdown of the booking system crash (and why not building your own booking system might be better š)
Cooking megainfluencer Khairul Aming opened reservations for his first Malay restaurant Rembayung at 9PM on 4 January. Users could book a table seating between 2 and 8 people for 1h 45minutes, within a 7 day window.
But by 9:05pm, users couldnāt use the reservation site properly. At least one other restaurant was affected for using the platform, owned by Malaysian startup UMAI.
By 9:07PM, unsuccessful users were getting 503 DEPLOYMENT_PAUSED errors but by 10PM, Rembayung was fully booked with over 2600 bookings made. Rembayungās booking link was also moved from restaurants.umai.io hosted in the US to reservation.umai.io hosted in Malays.
Allegedly on Khairul Amingās livestream on 4 Janaury, Khairul informed the UMAI team to expect around 100 thousand website visitors. But the UMAI team could only guarantee him 60,000.
Rembayung can seat 250 people at any one time, and it was already fully booked for 7 days at 2.6 thousand bookings. Itās impossible for an estimated 100,000 visitors to successfully get bookings anyway.
Rembayung could have also hired their own IT team to build their own booking system, but it would have been alot more expensive. SaaS like UMAIās platforms usually split their cloud resources and developers across their clients.
If Rembayung builds its own booking systems, they have to rent their own cloud resources, and hire developers and infrastructure experts to manage them. For a physical restaurant with only one branch, the cost would be too much to justify.
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