Yahoo Issues Cyber Monday Apology

November 30, 2007 | by Christopher Nickson

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.
 
 

Post Your Comment...Comments

Ti McGuiness on Nov 30th, 2007 at 9:42 AM:

Ouch!

Can you imagine being a yahoo merchant on Monday? Excited about all the business, whole staff ready, worried about being able to ship everything and keep up...

And then wondering what the hell was happening? Joining 20,000 other merchants in a phone queue?

Why do successful merchants stay there?

Jeff -n- Vegas on Nov 30th, 2007 at 10:14 AM:

That's rough for Yahoo!, but on the other hand, they are probably making those same vendors more money just by playing off the Yahoo name instead of selling on their own. I'm sure Yahoo will do the right thing and it's not even December yet, there's still a lot more shopping to come.

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