Today is the fifth class in our current six class set. Today we will talk about Grubhub.

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

Yesterday was a bad day for Grubhub. The food delivery service launched a free lunch promotion for people in New York City. Spoiler alert - it backfired.

MANUELA LOPEZ RESTREPO, BYLINE: Basically, what they offered was that if you placed an order on the app between the hours of 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., you would get $15 of credit to use towards getting yourself a free lunch.

KELLY: That is our producer, Manuela Lopez Restrepo. Yesterday, she tried to use the promotion to order from one of her favorite local spots in Brooklyn.

EMILY FENG, HOST:

But the process wasn't easy.

LOPEZ RESTREPO: When I first opened the Grubhub app, it seemed like everything had either crashed or the restaurants had decided to disclose themselves as not delivering.

FENG: After trying different methods, she was finally able to put in her order - a salad and a veggie burger. The order was confirmed. A driver was assigned. And then the order was canceled.

LOPEZ RESTREPO: When I looked into the fine print of why I hadn't received my order, it told me that the merchant had failed to confirm the order.

FENG: Scores of people had similar problems. Grubhub said at one point, 6,000 orders a minute were coming through their app. And eventually it crashed.

KELLY: Our producer wanted to find out what went wrong with the promotion from the restaurant's perspective. She sent us these voice memos on her way to talk to folks at Toad Style BK. It's the same restaurant she tried to order from yesterday.

Abby Horetz is the line cook there. She says she was confused about the sudden influx of orders.

TYLER MERFELD: We were getting six tickets at a time printing.

ABBY HORETZ: Yeah.

MERFELD: And then tried to pause it for 30 minutes, and then more just kept coming in.

FENG: In addition to the promotion, which they say came as a surprise, they also had a health inspection, a produce delivery and a new team member coming on board. They were overwhelmed. And then out of the blue, they started seeing the orders getting canceled. With all those cancellations, they ended up having a lot of orders that no one picked up.

Tyler Merfeld co-owns Toad Style BK with his wife, Jillian Camera. He says Grubhub didn't directly tell them about the promotion.

MERFELD: Totally would welcome this kind of promotion. It's awesome to get so much business.

JILLIAN CAMERA: Right.

MERFELD: But we would have liked the foresight. We could have had more people working.

CAMERA: Yeah.

MERFELD: It was busier than the Super Bowl.

CAMERA: Yeah.

KELLY: Merfeld's restaurant and his guests were not the only ones caught off guard. Some Grubhub users complained online that it took more than 6 hours for their food to arrive.

We reached out to Grubhub's team about their promotion. In an emailed statement, they told us that to help make sure restaurants get the food picked up, the company says they added driver incentives. They also said no one could anticipate the influx of orders, but they were able to fulfill 450,000 of the promotional lunches. They call that a, quote, "win-win for businesses and diners."