Google's Online Shopping festival off to an embarrassing start

Google India’s Great Online Shopping Festival has gotten off to a rather embarrassing start. The official website gosf.in is not loading and is currently displaying the message “Hello World © 2013.” Google India has already apologised on Twitter for the failure of the website saying they are trying to get it up and running again. You can view the tweets below: 

  According to Tech2, “at times the home page would load but the links would not work. Currently the home page is showing a 500 Server Error intermittently and taking ages to load when it does.” [caption id=“attachment_1281743” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Screengrab of Google Festival website which is down.[/caption] Google’s second “Great Online Shopping Festival” is an event that aims to bring all Indian E-commerce players on a common platform to provide the best deals on the web. The participants range from local and classified companies, online travel sites, auto companies, telecom companies, fashion labels, health and well being companies to banking and financial services. The initiative was launched by Google last year to boost the adoption of online shopping in India. Rajan Anandan, VP & Managing Director, Google India, said, “Great Online Shopping Festival is India’s version of cyber Monday in the West and is an exciting platform to raise awareness and consumer adoption of online shopping in India.” While the idea of giving great online deals should appeal to the urban Indian consumer, Google definitely needs to fix the site in the first place to get the festival going.