1 phone, 1 week, 1 lakh customers: How Flipkart crashed because of Xiaomi Mi 3

For the first time since inception, the servers of e-tailing behemoth Flipkart crashed on Tuesday as the mobile phone crazy country went berserk trying to order the new Chinese phone Xiaomi Mi 3 phone, available exclusively with Flipkart.

The phone too went out of stock 39 minutes after it went on sale. Neither the phone company, nor Flipkart made known the number of units of the phone, aggrresively priced at Rs13,999, were sold. It is quite likely to be in the region of 25,000 units. Sale of the phone will again start soon. Flipkart received 100,000 registrations for the phone but sale actually started only at noon on Tuesday.

After the server crashed and complaints started pouring in Flipkart tweeted: "Apologies for the issues our customers are facing... the Mi 3 launch is keeping our site very busy. Working on getting this fixed ASAP."

The first person to receive the Xiamo in India was Vijay Raj of Bangalore who was among the few who were given the chance to place an order on Monday after he 'liked' the phone on the Facebook page of Flipkart, which sent a cameraman, along with the delivery boy to record the moment. Raj told dna: "I had ordered my phone yesterday [Monday] and it was delivered today [Tuesday]. When I stepped out to receive the package, the delivery person was accompanied by a photographer. They said that I was the first person in the country to receive this phone so they wanted to take a picture of me,"

The push into India is part of CEO Lei Jun's drive to deliver a five-fold boost in sales to 100 million units next year and challenge Samsung Electronics Co and Apple globally.