1-800-Flowers Site Reported Down For 65 Hours. The Reality, Though, Was Quite Different
Written by Evan SchumanOctober 15th, 2009
Having long grown comfortable with using uptime monitoring services to check their own site's ongoing performance, many retailers are toying with using such services to watch for problems with direct rivals. And they have customized E-mail blasts ready to launch at the first sign of trouble.But an incident this week involving 1-800-Flowers—which the retail chain may have been utterly unaware of—illustrates one of the dangers of using Web monitoring services to track sites other than your own.
One site monitoring company this week reported that the 1-800-Flowers.com E-Commerce site was down for a whopping 65 hours and 26 minutes. The flower company didn't respond to our inquiries, but a fairly perplexed representative of the monitoring firm did. "To be honest, this is one of those rare cases where I’m not entirely sure if this is legitimate downtime, that is, downtime that regular human Web site visitors would notice," he said.
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Is there really an improvement between a mag swipe and contactless tap if multi-factor authentication is required?
-Ed
