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Dark For 36 Hours: Burlington’s Web Gambit

Written by Evan Schuman and Fred J. Aun
November 18th, 2009
Leaving online shoppers out in the cold with no warnings or explanations (or coats, if that's what they wanted to buy), Burlington Coat Factory took its Web site offline all day Wednesday (Nov. 18)—plus about 12 hours split between Tuesday and Thursday—for a planned outage as the $3.5 billion clothing retailer performed an extensive hardware and database upgrade.

In what a senior company official conceded was an oversight, the 430-store, New Jersey-based chain failed to publish any ahead-of-time advisories before yanking its E-Commerce site's plug in the wee hours. Nor did it post much in the way of an explanatory statement during the long downtime period that followed. "The messaging on the site could clearly have been better," Burlington Coat Factory Supervisor of Web Development Jack Follansbee said. "It was an omission. We should have done something (a status page) a little more customized."

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