Fumbles and Features for Search and Social Network Firms
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It feels like Thanksgiving was just yesterday, but of course that didn’t slow down some of our favorite search engines and social networks – well, except in one case. Here’s a quick round up of some of the good, bad, and ugly news currently breaking about Yahoo, Facebook, and Google.
We’ll start with Yahoo for something uglier than a day at the mall on Black Friday. Actually, this is about Black Friday’s Internet cousin, Cyber Monday. There have been projections for a while that shoppers would spend more money purchasing gifts online on the Monday after Thanksgiving this year than they did on the same day last year. So you’d think that Yahoo Merchant Solutions, formerly known as Yahoo Stores, would be ready for this rush of business, right?
Wrong. More than 10,000 online merchants and their customers felt the pain as Yahoo’s shopping cart software crashed. The first signs of the problem showed up around 8:30 AM, with shoppers receiving an “Error Message During Checkout,” according to the Yahoo Merchant Solutions System Status Page. Apparently the problem continued until well after 5 PM, when Yahoo posted that it was still investigating the issue.
The problem was not resolved until almost 7 PM that evening. Yahoo stated at the time that it had made configuration changes. “All merchants are able to accept orders at this time with slower than expected performance. We are continuing to investigate and make additional changes to optimize the checkout experience. Additional updates will be provided as they become available.”
Yahoo Merchant Solutions may be up and running now, but how does Yahoo propose to make up for the damage to its merchants? Cyber Monday is supposed to be the day that everyone does their holiday shopping online from work. The system was down during the very same hours that most people work. In short, merchants using Yahoo’s system lost more than eight hours of absolutely prime time traffic. It’s estimated that merchants saw $700 million in online sales this year from Cyber Monday; you can imagine how little of that went to those 10,000 hapless merchants who had every right to believe that Yahoo would come through for them and have its act together.
So far I haven’t been able to find any details regarding a fuller reaction from Yahoo. Will the company at least apologize to the merchants? Offer some kind of credit for the down time? All I know is that Yahoo has 10,000 angry merchants on its hands, and I’d be very surprised if some of them aren’t checking out systems from other companies – like Google, for example – that might be more reliable when it counts.
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