Why Bamboo app went down during Dangote Refinery IPO – CEO

Bamboo, one of the platforms handling subscriptions for the Dangote Refinery IPO, experienced downtime within the first 30 minutes of the offer opening after traffic surged beyond 10 times its normal level.

However, the unprecedented traffic was not the only factor behind the disruption, with failures and timeouts among third-party service providers adding to the pressure on the platform, its CEO, Richmond Bassey, has said.

Bassey told Nairametrics that the platform had scaled its infrastructure to accommodate a surge.

However, traffic quickly exceeded the level Bamboo had been ready to handle.

What really happened to Bamboo during the IPO?

Shortly after the Dangote Refinery IPO went live on September 14, some Bamboo users took to social media to report difficulties accessing their accounts.

Bamboo subsequently issued a statement acknowledging the disruption and assured users that its services would be restored.

Nairametrics asked Bamboo CEO to walk us through what happened in the first 30 minutes of the IPO and what caused the access issues.

According to Bassey, Bamboo had anticipated a surge in demand for the Dangote Refinery IPO and expanded its infrastructure to handle up to five times its normal traffic ahead of the offer.

• “We anticipated that there would be significant demand for the IPO. We scaled our tech infrastructure accordingly and prepared for a 4-5x traffic increase. We also had reserve spare capacity that could serve up to a 10x increase,” he told Nairametrics.
• “But we actually had more than a 10x spike in traffic within the first 30 minutes which initially caused the downtime,” he added.

Bassey also explained that the volume of traffic alone was not the only challenge the platform faced.

• “On its own, that level of traffic would have been extremely difficult, but we probably could have managed it. The bigger issue was that many critical processes on the Bamboo app depend on third-party providers,” he added.

He said these included OTP generation, account creation, password resets, deposits and KYC, all of which rely to varying degrees on external infrastructure.

Repeated retries added to traffic pressure

The problems with third-party providers created another layer of pressure as customers attempted transactions again after receiving failed responses.

Bassey explained that failed transactions also required Bamboo’s systems to communicate the failure to customers, who could then initiate another attempt.

He said this combination of the unprecedented influx of customers, third-party services struggling under the load and repeated transaction retries eventually led to Cloudflare throttling a significant portion of Bamboo’s traffic.

Bamboo was not the only digital investment platform to experience pressure as investors rushed to participate in the Dangote Refinery IPO. Cowrywise also reported slower-than-usual response times as investors sought to subscribe to the offer.

Third-party dependencies exposed another risk

The disruption highlights a broader risk facing increasingly interconnected financial platforms: a company’s resilience can depend on the capacity of the businesses and service providers connected to it.

Bamboo had scaled its own infrastructure ahead of the IPO, but Bassey said critical functions depended on third-party providers that also came under pressure as traffic surged.

The experience echoes a concern raised by Jephte Ioudom, founder of FoubsLabs. In August, Ioudom spoke to Nairametrics about third-party risk in Nigeria’s financial ecosystem.

He argued that large financial institutions can remain exposed when smaller businesses connected to their operations become weak points in the wider ecosystem.

In Bamboo’s case, there was no reported cyberattack or security breach. Instead, the IPO showed how disruptions at connected service providers can affect customers even when the main platform has prepared for a surge in demand.