Cyber Monday Disaster For Yahoo

Posted on November 27, 2007

On Cyber Monday many of Yahoo's merchants were unable to proces orders when Yahoo's shopping check-out service stopped working. CNET reports that the issues lasted from 6 a.m. until 1 p.m. and were not completely back to normal until 6 p.m. This made Cyber Monday one frustrating day for Yahoo merchants and for any shoppers trying to purchase items.

The problems started around 6 a.m. PT Monday with outages in Yahoo's systems that power the merchant stores, according to Yahoo's Yodel Anecdotal blog. The issues lasted until about 1 p.m. PT when transactions began going through at a much higher rate, albeit much slower. By 6 p.m. PT things were back to normal, the blog entry said.
That's at least seven hours with no service, and then another five hours with slow service, on what is believed to be a huge online-shopping day.
"We deeply regret the inconvenience this caused to both our merchants and their shoppers. Our customers' expectations were not met, nor were our own. And we are moving mountains inside Yahoo to find out why and how this happened, and to take steps to try to ensure it doesn't happen again," Rich Riley, senior vice president of Yahoo's online channel division, wrote in the entry, which also includes the words "mea culpa" in a purple box. "As for the future, rest assured that we are taking the necessary steps to prepare for the peak holiday selling season. We have technical and customer relations staff mobilized and ready to support our partners."
I don't think that will do much to pacify Yahoo customers who were livid and threatening to cancel their accounts.
"Absolute disaster for us...We were having a record weekend and now this...What a disgrace for Yahoo to have issues on one of the most important days of the year," a Webmaster with the alias "jwrunner" wrote in WebMasterWorld discussion group.

Tech Check has a few more comments from uhappy Yahoo merchants. Yahoo's apology the for Cyber Monday disaster can be found here.