Cyber Monday madness maims website response

Cyber Monday madness may have pulled in record sales and traffic figures, but it put enormous strain on some of the Internet’s well-known vendors, causing response times to slow and payment systems to malfunction.

by Helen Leggatt

comScore Networks predicts that this year’s Cyber Monday sales could surpass $700 million, making it the heaviest online spending day on record. This is backed up by Akamai’s observations taken at 2pm on Cyber Monday afternoon in which 300 of their tracked websites were pulling in 4.6 million visitors per minute.

However, some businesses have fallen victim to the huge numbers of online shoppers with transaction and page-load times increasing by as much as 300 – 400 percent. Sears.com was shut down for most of the day. Keynote Systems said they would normally expect a 5 – 10 percent increase is sluggishness.

“Consumers are increasingly turning to the Web for their holiday shopping, and thus the success of a retailer’s holiday season is increasingly tied to their site’s performance,” said Shawn White, director of external operations for Keynote. "First, is that there appear to be significant slowdowns on a number of leading retail Web sites, with traditional brick-and-mortar retailers faring the worst. Second, is the fact that the slowdowns are impacting at the crucial product search and checkout portions of their shopping process."