Cyber Monday Crashes Yahoo's Shopping Service

There is a good side to this news and a bad side.

Good: online shopping is robust...Black/Cyber Monday was Green Monday

Bad: How many sales did I lose....grrrrrrrr....

Special Note: Better make sure you are using more than one shopping comparison engine to list products -- see there is always a silver lining in anything we do. :-)

-- Chip

<<<CLICK HERE>>> for full story, or see below

By Terrence Russell 

Big box retailers may have suffered from heavy web traffic on Black Friday, but Yahoo got its turn in the flame too. The first Monday back from Thanksgiving break (aka Cyber Monday) is supposed to be one of the biggest shopping days for online retailers both large and small. So, when Yahoo's check-out service for nearly 40,000 online merchants went on the fritz for nearly 11 hours, there was a legitimate cause for panic.

During the troubleshooting process which started at 8:31am PST, Yahoo described the problem as shoppers "receiving an error message indicating 'system unavailable' during the checkout process." The glitch not only threw off online shoppers (who were otherwise able to view the merchandise), but also infuriated quite a few of its merchants. What's worse is that the mysterious nature of the outage was only compounded by its length. It wasn't until 6:51pm PST that the system was back up, and even then it was running slow.

The 800 pound gorilla in the room remains, as irate merchants continue to question how much business was lost by the outage. The company has since released an apology to merchants stating that,  "Yahoo's relationship with our merchants is extremely important to us, and we value their loyalty." We'll see how much the merchants value Yahoo's services after this holiday season.