Data Center Knowledge

Yahoo Apologizes for Cyber Monday Outage

Posted By Rich Miller On November 30, 2007 @ 5:26 pm In Downtime | Comments Disabled

Yahoo (YHOO) has apologized to customers for serious problems with its Yahoo Small Business payment system on Cyber Monday, which left thousands of online merchants unable to take orders on one of the busiest online shopping days. Shopping carts for many of Yahoo’s turnkey online stores were not working at all from 6 a.m. to 1 p.m., and remained sluggish until at least 6 p.m. The retail industry had been heavily promoting Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving) as the kickoff of the online shoping season. Many online retailers offered sales and promotions to capitalize on news coverage of Cyber Monday. Rich Riley, senior vice president of Yahoo’s online channel division, addressed the downtime on the company’s Yodel Anecdotal blog [1]:
Unfortunately, the system outage occurred at one of the worst possible times, and despite our concerted efforts to fix the problem as it emerged on Monday, we know that we let our merchant partners and their customers down. … Our customers’ expectations were not met, nor were our own. And we are moving mountains inside Yahoo! to find out why and how this happened, and to take steps to try to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Customers are hopping mad, as evidenced by the comments on Riley’s post, which gave a timeline but provided few details about what happened and why. The outage received widespread news coverage at CNBC [2], Wired [3] and CNet [4].

Yet another reason to plan for failure [5] and be ready to respond and adapt if Murphy shows up at the worst possible time.

About Rich Miller [6]

Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.

Article printed from Data Center Knowledge: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com

URL to article: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2007/11/30/yahoo-apologizes-for-cyber-monday-outage/

URLs in this post:

[1] Yodel Anecdotal blog: http://yodel.yahoo.com/2007/11/27/cyber-monday-into-resolution-tuesday/

[2] CNBC: http://www.cnbc.com/id/21991959

[3] Wired: http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/11/cyber-monday-tr.html

[4] CNet: http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9824045-7.html?tag=nefd.top

[5] plan for failure: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2007/Nov/08/data_center_failure_as_a_learning_experience.html

[6] Rich Miller: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/author/richm/

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