New financial management tool 22seven crashes on launch day

A few hours after its beta launch, new financial management tool 22Seven crashed under the weight of users visiting the site. The new startup has been operating in stealth mode for months, but chose to launch its service today.

Twitter has been alive with comment about the launch and the company sent out a tweet following comments from users querying server errors.

Aaand the site is down. We can’t handle this much love! Apologies while we kick servers into overdrive to get things up and running again.

— 22seven support (@The22Svens) January 26, 2012

The startup is the brainchild of Twenty20 founder Christo Davel, and is billed as an “intelligent money saving tool” that plugs directly and securely into users’ personal bank accounts and then delivers analysis on spending habits.

While most money management tools require users to transfer their data and information across from their bank accounts, 22seven automatically grabs this information from a bank account — with the user’s permission and the bank’s cooperation.

As buzz of the new service hit various online and social spaces, the site’s three servers found it hard to cope with the flurry of visitors. According to 22Seven’s Head of Technology, Kenny Inggs, one of the three servers crumbled due to a “redundancy error” when a backup server failed.

He says the company will be adding another server for additional capacity, hoping that it will help the site cope with the demand.

“We didn’t expect so many people to sign up so quickly,” he adds.

A numbers of users have complained that they were unable to register and that the site was down.

Below are some user tweets:

If anyone is having issues with the #22seven BETA, chat to the support team @The22Svens – I’m sure traffic is high…

— Andy Hadfield (@andyhadfield) January 26, 2012

@The22Svens #22seven just went down right after I linked it. #suspicious and not cool.

— Corne Prinsloo (@corneprinsloo) January 26, 2012

Looks like @The22Svens are busier than expected! Getting “Oops!” quite a few times 🙂

— Janet Hancock (@RUBIO_Janet) January 26, 2012