2006 Holiday Season Report Highlights

• December 26, 2006 CircuitCity.com down for 20 minutes: CircuitCity.com website registered around 20 minutes downtime early in the morning today, displaying a "Our website is being updated" message to the online visitors. Other than that and the usual short but many drops from WalMart.com website, no events of particular importance were detected during the reported period.
• December 22, 2006 Sears.com website down for more than 3 hours: Sears.com website experienced severe availability problems for more than 3 hours, timing out on most probes at the index page and occasionally at some of the consecutive steps of the monitored transaction. According to WebSitePulse experts, the website downtime could have been the result of heavy load or misconfiguration of the Sears.com servers. For more information, please click here.
• December 19, 2006 Kmart.com down for 30 minutes, CircuitCity.com shut down for the night: Today, 30 minutes downtime in the first step of the checkout process was detected at Kmart.com website. A brief message stating that the web page is currently being worked on was displayed instead of the login form. The other notable event for the day was the shutting down of the whole CircuitCity.com website for upgrades during the night. At 7 am EST everything went back to normal for the online shoppers of CircuitCity.com.
• December 16, 2006 More downtime for BestBuy.com today: Multiple isolated timeouts were detected today with the majority of the monitored websites. The one with biggest downtime registered was again the BestBuy.com website. The website shopping system was again down for maintenance, but only in the small hours and for a shorter period of time compared to the previous night.
• December 15, 2006 BestBuy.com website unavailable again for 9 hours: Late evening and early morning online visitors of the BestBuy.com website - one of the leading web destinations during the Holiday shopping period found a non-functioning website with a message asking them to come back later. The site was unavailable from 11:30 pm EST on Thursday up until 8:30 am EST on Friday. The incident was also reported by InformationWeek. For more details please click here.
• December 14, 2006 BestBuy website down for 30 minutes: Bestbuy.com website registered 30 minutes of downtime today starting at 11:30 pm EST. The failure was detected and confirmed by all monitoring locations performing the shopping transaction on the website. A message published on the front page of the BestBuy website said that the downtime is a result of updates in the online ordering system.
• October 24, 2006 Wal-Mart experiences severe website problems: The response time of a typical web transaction on the Wal-Mart website doubled during the morning hours on Black Friday, reaching critical levels of 6-7 times the usual values around noon, and getting back to normal after 4:00 PM EST. During that time, WebSitePulse detected a number of unsuccessful web transactions as well, resulting in less than 90% uptime for Walmart.com. Kmart.com and Bestbuy.com websites also delivered less than 99% uptime.