Econet’s Ownai hit by another outage. Separately, hackers claim they attacked it

L.S.M Kabweza Avatar

Econet’s classifieds website, Ownai, is down again. It’s not clear yet if it’s another case of lots of visitors trying to visit the site at once (they just sent out an SMS ad inviting user to the platform) or if it’s the case of hackers having hit it again.

A local tech  blog, Techunzipped,  said today however that some hackers claimed to have gained access to the site in the past few days. The current downtime and the hacking could be unrelated though because even after seeing the article earlier, we noticed the website was up and operating normally.

As far as we can tell, the site as been down for about 30 minutes now. Hopefully they fix it soon. As long as it doesn’t take more than day (or the near 3 months it took with Tengai) it should be a big problem. Nothing beats zero-rated at the end of the day so users will likely just wait and try again later. Yes, zero rated is still unfair but this is business, and it’s the regulator that needs to act, not the business.

Here’s a tweet from one user of the platform:

And you can read the Techunzipped article on the hacking here.

16 comments

  1. Cool

    Mabasa enyu techzim coz its working here,

  2. Cool

    Mabasa enyu coz kuno iri up

  3. Anonymous

    Think they’re probably just sending out too many SMS at once. I doubt Econet have the luxury of the huge sever farms used by amazon and ebay. If you have a zero-rated site everyone will want to access. From what i’ve seen so far the site seems pretty good. Early days still I guess.

  4. kudzai

    Site seems to be working ok for me. Maybe some people are having network issues.

  5. disappointed_zimbo

    I wonder if classifieds are trying to sabotage Ownai? If so, i’m sure econet can launch an effective counter attack. Childish games in Zimbabwean e-commerce it would seem. Why can’t everyone just work to promote the sector and stop fighting before it’s even established.

    1. tinm@n

      You’re even more absurd to suggest that as some act of sabotage by classifieds

      1. disappointed_zimbo

        I just said “I wonder.” I hope its not true. we need many good online sites to trade on in Zim. especially in this economy. i use both right now and would welcome more. there’s never too many places to advertise a business.

    2. L.S.M Kabweza

      childish is you

  6. Kainos

    This is a lie, the site is up and running

    1. Anonymous

      Yeh seems to be working for me too. I think people are just out to get Ownai. Sad!

    2. Mazambane

      Really? It’s a lie? Why not just say “site was running when I checked – must have been a brief or intermittent outage”. It was down, for at least 30m that is a fact. I suspect a lot of comments are from Econet employees. You are a high profile business, you must get used to the scrutiny

      1. L.S.M Kabweza

        Yup. It’s them.

  7. Chairman KillerT

    Techzim mairasa the website is up and running….anyone asati aenda pa this zero rated site atosara like pakaita vanhu mari neEcocash. Econet is truly aZimbabwean company with its people at heart. Please Econet keep the site for free we are doing business online…

    1. L.S.M Kabweza

      You do realise the website doesn’t have to be done now to have been down yesterday, right.

  8. R

    If ownai is having issues with hackers who are probarly using a ddos attck then cloudflare should protect them from that until they can handle such issues themselves. Ps it will cost less than a 10000 per year for average protection. Cisco reddit and nasdaq do it.

  9. Leslie

    As a tech guy and knows some little about servers and how they work, i think ownai.co.zw’s server isnt strng enought to sustain the heavy usage of their own platform, and i totally understand that buying a server is not a joke, worse off maintaining the server isn’t either, but in a situation like theirs, the public is gaining more than Ownai/Econet is, and therefore if this platform was generating some income or maybe if users could rank higher if they payed more, then Econet would succeed in the Ownai platform and upgrade their server handlinng hardware.

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