Kohl’s, Lowe’s, Staples Start The Black Friday Crashes
Written by Evan Schuman and Fred J. AunThe most significant initial glitches of Black Friday seemed to be owned by Staples and Kohl's, though. Staples was down much of the morning, displaying a screen that said "Oops, you're too early. Staples.com will be unavailable until 6 AM ET. Come back then and save big!" That clearly seemed to be a deliberate shutdown, but the site went down again throughout much of the day, bizarrely displaying the same "come back after 6 AM" screen, although the 6:00 AM time had come and gone. In fact, the screen was seen in mid-afternoon and, when the site was up, page loads were quite slow. Setting aside the post-6:00 AM glitches—which were clearly unintentional—the strategy of bringing the entire Staples site down is intriguing. Why cut off access to the entire site?
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2 Comments | Read Kohl’s, Lowe’s, Staples Start The Black Friday Crashes
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November 29th, 2009 at 11:52 pm
This article completely missed another site that’s been down since early Friday morning: Joann.com. There have been scattered reports of people through to the page early Sunday morning, but for most people, the site has been completely unavailable. There are also reports from people who did not receive confirmation emails for orders placed shortly before the outage.
November 30th, 2009 at 12:15 am
Editor’s Note: I’m not so sure that it’s fair to say that we missed it as much as it fell below our target criteria. We based that report on a list of more than 100 retail chains that we track. The criteria is varied but Jo-Ann is not one that we currently track that closely. Clearly, there was tons of retailers that had issues on Friday, but we focused on the most well-known chains where we could confirm incidents.
That said, Jo-Ann operates in some 47 states in the U.S. and had almost $2 billion in annual revenue (and about 758 stores) so it might be a chain we should be watching more carefully. Thanks for the comment!