Overwhelming demand for Chinese smartphone Xiaomi Mi3 on the first day of its sale caused the product page of e-commerce site Flipkart, its exclusive retailer in India, to crash.

Despite the glitches, Xiaomi, which entered India on July 15, said it sold the entire Mi 3 stock in 38 minutes and 50 seconds.

The crash, a little after noon on Tuesday, a few minutes after booking opened, prevented several customers from completing their orders.

The same thing had happened during the exclusive launch of MotoG and MotoE phones earlier.

According to Flipkart, the site received 100,000 registrations for the phone during the July 15-21 registration period.

“Based on the response we saw during the registration phase, we had anticipated a traffic spike and had scaled up our web services accordingly. But the number of customers who logged in immediately after the phone went live on our site caused the process to slow down for a while,” said the Flipkart spokesperson.

“We got about 100,000 registrations for the Mi3. We sold out within the first 30 minutes,” the spokesperson claimed.

Xiaomi Mi 3, which is priced at ₹13,999 on Flipkart, is pitted against Google’s Nexus handset.

Apologising to fans who couldn’t purchase the Mi 3 today, Manu Jain, India Operations Head, Xiaomi, said: “We underestimated the demand we would receive and we are taking steps to ramp up the supply as soon as possible.”

“We are working with Flipkart to ensure the purchase experience is improved further and technical issues are resolved,” he added.

The Flipkart spokesperson added: “We are expanding our capacity to provide a smoother shopping experience the next time.”

Though the company declined to comment on the number of units sold, it said it would be getting the phone back in stock next week.

Jain added that Xiaomi would ensure that customers who missed out on today’s sale are automatically registered to buy an Mi 3 during the next sale on July 29.

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