Down For 8 Days: American Eagle’s Site Disaster
Written by Frank Hayes and Evan SchumanJuly 29th, 2010
In one of the longest site outages ever for a multi-billion-dollar retailer, Tuesday (July 27) saw the apparent end of more than a week of Web problems and days of an outright crashed site for Pittsburgh-based clothing chain American Eagle Outfitters, which outsources much of its Web operations to IBM. The site crashed last Monday (July 19) and stayed dark until Friday, when it limped along with various parts not functioning until Tuesday (July 27) afternoon.
The site's problems, though, shed light on an interesting strategy. During the many days of complete Web site death, the $2.7 billion apparel chain's mobile site still looked alive, although it was not functional. This availability raises the question: Should retailers look to their mobile sites as emergency backups for their Web sites? Should pages indicating that a site is down automatically include a link to the site's mobile version?
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Our Comment SPAM system is getting very aggressive these days and has been blocking legitimate comments. If you post a comment and don't see it appear within 2 hours or so, can you please send a heads-up to customer-service@storefrontbacktalk.com? Ideally, please include the time you posted the comment. That will allow us to try and hunt for it. Thanks! P.S. We're working on fixing the system, but we don't want to lose any valuable comments in the meantime.
-Christine
July 29th, 2010 at 4:26 am
Contingency planning is frought with all sorts of pitfalls. The suggestion about running your mobile site on “mirrored versions of the key databases” sounds great, aprt from in AE’s case the gradual curruption of the main site’s databases due to the array problem would also be “mirrored” onto the mobile site.
You could handle bandwidth issues by locating in the same datacentre and sharing the main site’s bandwidth. But that leaves both sites vulnerable to both a bandwidth outage or a datacentre failure (say, the power supply fails.
It reminds me of the phrase currently very popular with politians (certainly over here in the UK) “it’s a problem of unintended consequences”.