What Was Wal-Mart Thinking When It Made Key Site Changes On Black Friday?
Written by Evan SchumanDecember 3rd, 2008
At about 6 AM New York time on Black Friday (Nov. 28), Wal-Mart's site went down for about an hour and then came back up. But this time, the company had moved its content pages to an outside service. Wal-Mart said this was a scheduled change, a concept that Gareth Evans, head of client services at Web tracking firm Sitemorse, finds unlikely.
"We saw where they suddenly shifted all of their, presumably, image content over to Akamai on the morning of Black Friday," Evans said. "Now that's a really odd thing to do, you know? Hey, it's a really big day. Let's make a major change to our infrastructure without testing it. What if that had gone wrong? As it happens, they were OK once it came onstream, but they had no idea whether that was going to benefit them or be detrimental. They turned it on at 7 o'clock in the morning."
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2 Comments | Read What Was Wal-Mart Thinking When It Made Key Site Changes On Black Friday?
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December 3rd, 2008 at 11:36 pm
Maybe they just think they were smarter then what they were and wouldn’t have any problems. You would think they at least would of done it around 2am.
December 4th, 2008 at 5:33 pm
Another possiblity, not yet considered, is that Walmart did *indeed* test this change days prior and simply decided to deploy the change when they did. Granted, I would agree with the previous comment that doing so earlier in the day would have allowed for more time to recover or revert back had it introduced any problems…which it did not by-the-way.