2009 Holiday Season Report Highlights

• December 18, 2009 Radioshack.com experience an outage. With the holidays approaching, more and more sites are facing a slow-but-steady traffic increase. This results in slower loading of the pages and increased response time. Yesterday our system registered several timeout warnings for toysrus.com, compusa.com, circuitcity.com and radioshack.com. The most notable outage was for radioshack.com which started at 18:44 EST and lasted over 50 minutes.
• December 10, 2009 The day was marked by the Kmart.com failures. The problem started at the early hours of the day around 02:52 AM when the checkout page of the e-shop failed, showing a message that there's a high load on the site, which was caused most probably by shop maintenance. The worst came 3 hours later when their home page started to show message indicating a problem with their web server configuration - "SRVE0255E: A WebGroup/Virtual Host to handle /shc/s/home_10151_10104 has not been defined". The problem was temporary solved, and few hours later appeared again at 7:40AM, 9:10AM, 10:52AM, 12:50AM and 1:57PM.
• November 27, 2009 This Black Friday didn't prove as much as initially expected. No outages of major importance were detected. The only notable thing was that Kmart closed their site for non-US customers. This prevented the high traffic overload of their site that happened last year. Due to the fact that many of the products were out of stock by midday the Kmart transaction failed. This resulted in some downtime which was recorded. We have rebuilt the transaction with one of the available products, so this downtime can be disregarded.
• November 24, 2009 It seems that this season Kmart.com are really under pressure. This time they decided to show their e-customers where's the nearby store using the Google Maps search engine, while displaying a message "Our site is super busy, but we'll get you to kmart.com in just a moment". According to our monitoring system the "moment" prolonged for 20 minutes starting at 6:43 PM The daily Average Response time from all monitored websites was 3.707 sec.; the daily Average Uptime - 99.55%
• November 23, 2009 Not a good start for Kmart.com at the first day of our special Holiday Retail Tracking program. The downtime of the site started around 23:05 showing a message: "We're sorry, Kmart.com is temporarily experiencing high traffic volume. Please try your request again in a few minutes." for about 6 minutes. The error was detected at the product page where our monitoring agent tries to browse a specific product. However the error was not at the home page, which means that some parts of the site were accessible. The daily Average Response time from all monitored websites was 3.666 sec.; the daily Average Uptime - 99.21%