Yahoo Issues Cyber Monday Apology
By Christopher Nickson
November 30, 2007
Outage takes merchants out of the game for much of the busiest online shopping day of the year.
It couldn’t have happened at a worse time. On the Monday after Thanksgiving, the busiest online shopping day of the year, an outage on Yahoo meant merchants were unable to process orders.
According to Yahoo, the service went down at 6am Pacific time. It was restored, at a slow speed by 1 pm, but it was 6 pm before everything was once again running normally.
Unsurprisingly, retailers using the service were far from happy.
In a blog posting, Rich Riley, senior vice president of Yahoo’s online channel division, wrote,
"We deeply regret the inconvenience this caused to our merchants and their shoppers. Our customers' expectations were not met, nor were our own."
However, mere words haven’t done much to placate merchants for the loss of business on what they expected to be a hugely profitable day. Some want compensation from Yahoo.
And was it a busy cyber day? Indeed it was. According to ComScore, online sales for Cyber Monday reached $733 million, the highest recorded on a single day.