Cyber Monday Server Fails

Cyber Monday certainly has created a good share of 503 status codes (that's a Service Unavailable for those that don't speak HTTP :). I experienced some major issues today, most notably with Land's End. Their servers were up and down for hours, with all sorts of messages. My favorite was "Zero Size Object". When I finally got to checkout, it told me they had a temporary error in calculating the order total (so my discount code was not applied).

I had the idea that perhaps they were using sticky sessions and my session was stuck to a dead server, but that didn't seam to be the case.

So I decided to pick up the phone and give them a call, and guess what I got -- a busy signal. The line was busy for a few minutes, and then I finally go through only to be on hold for another 15 minutes. When I finally talked to someone I had the issue sorted pretty quickly.

I also had some problems with Barnes & Nobles, their shopping cart servers were also down for quite some time.

As someone who has been on the other side of these types of issues, you can be pretty certain that there was quite a bit of chaos going on at ecommerce sites that under estimated either their capacity or the demand for their services.

I guess this goes to show that you can still run into crowds when you shop online. Did you experience anything like this?