With Black Friday and Cyber Monday in our rearview mirror, it’s all about the December holidays for consumers. And for e-commerce platforms, just because Thanksgiving is in the dust does not mean that these companies can take a break from running at peak performance and high availability. Conversely, now is the time to really dig deep and assess the health of your platform before heading into crunch time for online shoppers.
In fact, December shopping days can be extremely busy. Last year, the latter portion of the November-December holiday shopping season saw particularly strong growth, especially for Free Shipping Day on Monday, Dec. 17 (up 76 percent to $1.013 billion) and Christmas Day (up 36 percent to 288 million), according to comScore. But last year also saw some of the most crippling holiday season outages to date.
Let’s review some of the most disastrous website holiday outages of 2012:
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
It was bad enough for AWS that its platform went down June 29 and October 22 in 2012, but when a major outage hit on Christmas Eve due to an elastic load balancing failure in AWS, some of the largest casualties hit Netflix. During a time in which infinite numbers of consumers comb the video streaming platform to catch up on the newest movie releases and television episodes, the outage was a true disaster for the company.
Kohl’s
Last year on Nov. 21, shopping aficionados everywhere were foaming at the bit when Kohl’s unveiled 500 early bird specials, 20 percent discounts on already low prices and free shipping orders over $50 in honor of Black Friday. But they were met with huge disappointment when they were unable to take advantage of the attractive deals. For several hours on Thanksgiving Eve, customers were met with an outage message, delays and an overall unresponsive site.
Our Favorite Retailers
From even the 3,000-foot view, many of our beloved e-retailers did not fare well during last year’s holiday season with mega-names like Kmart.com experiencing 10 hours and 50 minutes of downtime; Sears.com coming in at 10 hours and 30 minutes; TigerDirect.com logging six hours and 21 minutes; and Victoria’s Secret reporting six hours and 18 minutes of downtime. In fact, according to Panopta, 41 sites failed to meet the goal of 99.9 percent uptime last year.
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