'Proactive Measures' Led Best Buy to Take Site Down at Peak of Black Friday Frenzy
Best Buy’s possibly worst Black Friday nightmare became reality just before 10 a.m. EST Friday when visitors to BestBuy.com were greeted with the message: "WE'RE SORRY. BestBuy.com is currently unavailable. Check back soon." In a statement emailed to us at…
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11:11 a.m., spokeswoman Amy von Walter denied the site had crashed under the weight of Black Friday traffic. Instead, "a concentrated spike in mobile traffic triggered issues that led us to shut down BestBuy.com in order to take proactive measures to restore full performance," von Walter said. "Our consumers can return to BestBuy.com in the next several hours to take advantage of today’s door busters." BestBuy.com was back up and running again when we checked minutes after receiving the statement. In very light trading volume Friday morning, Best Buy’s stock performance seemed unaffected by the outage, with shares trading 1.8 percent higher just before noon EST. But analysts took Best Buy to task for its untimely outage, many brimming with sarcasm, such as one who reported that "Black Friday isn't the best day for your website to crash." Another said the outage was evidence why Wall Street has long been critical of brick-and-mortar companies that "are still in transition to moving their model online," because "the transition for those formerly doing only in-store to moving to e-commerce is a real caveat that not many people think about." When BestBuy.com returned to action, listed among the doorbuster sellouts were a Hewlett-Packard Deskjet 2544 wireless all-in-one printer for $26.99 (normally $79.99) and a SanDisk 128-GB USB 2.0 flash drive for $27.99 (normally $139.99). Still available were a $499.99 Vizio 50-inch LED-backlit 1080p LCD TV with 240 Hz frame rate (normally $699.99) and a $779.99 MacBook Air laptop with 11.6-inch display, 4 GB memory and 128-GB flash storage (normally $899.99).