Even as Flipkart's Big Billion Day sale in October clocked a gross merchandise value (GMV) of $100 million, the event was marred by glitches, and promoters Sachin and Binny Bansal had to apologise. But if details of scale behind the scenes are anything to go by, the company had made extensive preparations for the event. The event was planned over more than 700,000 man hours (six months of work put in by 280 people over 14 hours every day) to get the back-end systems ready.

The additional capacity created for the mega sale was higher than Flipkart had done through the seven years since its launch in 2007, an executive from the company's IT team said.