A crush of online shoppers paralyzed Walmart.com, the Web site of the nation's leading retailer, for long periods on Friday.
Black Friday saw consumers struggle briefly to access the Web sites of several top online stores. But the most serious service disruption was at Walmart.com, according to Ben Rushlo, senior manager of competitive research at Keynote Systems. He said performance at the site fell off dramatically starting at 4:30 a.m. ET on Friday.
"We pretty much saw a 100 percent outage on the Wal-Mart site until 2:30 p.m. Eastern time," Rushlo said. "Wal-Mart took the site down at one point and put up a splash page that said, 'Sorry, we're experiencing high volume.'"
Linda Blakley, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman, said, "Due to a higher-than-anticipated traffic surge, we made the decision to shut down the site temporarily. The site is open for business and the problem resolved."
Amazon.com stumbled only briefly on Thursday, after announcing the availability on the site of 1,000 deeply discounted Xbox 360 video game consoles, according to Keynote, which tracks Web site performance.
As bargain hunters converged on the site, some had trouble accessing Amazon for about 15 minutes, according to Rushlo.
"We noticed a little bit of a blip at about 2 p.m. Eastern time on (Thanksgiving day), Rushlo said. "Amazon's performance was stellar on Friday."
The Associated Press reported that the Walt Disney Company site DisneyShopping.com also suffered brief outages on Friday.
Representatives from Amazon and Disney could not be reached on Friday.
...or so I thought until I tried to access walmart.com on Friday. It seems there will always be a problem getting physical access to sales on Black Friday, but the Internet should be different. How can these sites not have performance/load tested their software any better than this? For their single biggest day of the year they "closed their doors"??? Someone should be looking for their performance architects head...
I long ago gave up on physical shopping, but this is what kind of thing is pushing me other online retailers.
I never expected Wal-Mart to ever get swamped on the net. Maybe Amazon, Circuit City, or Best Buy, but Wal-Mart? This shows that Wal-Mart really is a force to be reckoned with as far as department stores go.
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I long ago gave up on physical shopping, but this is what kind of thing is pushing me other online retailers.