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Downtime Ugliness At Beauty Site Sephora.com

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June 10th, 2009
Meet the Queen of Crashes. Glamour-product retailer Sephora calls its E-Commerce effort "the world's top beauty Web site." The criterion for that claim is not revealed, but surely it isn't uptime. Sephora.com is one of the most troubled retail sites in the segment, in terms of it staying open for business. Sephora's online face has repeatedly gone offline, often for hours, during the past six months. One of the worst spells began Saturday (June 6). It included a whopping eight hours of continuous downtime on Monday (June 8) and continued into the week, according to Web site monitoring company Pingdom.

Although the 8-hour outage on Monday was—at the time—the longest period the site was dead in the water, the other outages were not minor. In addition to the 8-hour incident on Monday, the site was offline ten other times that day with four of those outages lasting an hour or more and the others lasting at least 25 minutes. The site also was reported by Pingdom to be down about 10 times on Saturday, with most of those outages being less than 30 minutes long. But Sephora has been running into quite a history of site problems, dating back to last year's Cyber Monday (Dec. 1).

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