The website of retail giant Wal-Mart was hit by
intermittent outages on one of the busiest shopping days of the
year as it failed to cope with the level of traffic.
Visitors to the Walmart.com experienced delayed searches, blank
pages and messages advising them to try again later for most of
last Friday – the day after the US Thanksgiving holiday and the
traditional start to the festive shopping season in the US.
A spokesperson for the retailer said the problems were caused by
a “higher than anticipated traffic surge” as shoppers rushed
online.
The Walmart.com crash followed problems at Amazon.com, where a
Thanksgiving day special offer on Microsoft's Xbox 360 video game
machines brought a brief outage.
The site is expected to attract another surge of visitors this
week, which begins with “Cyber Monday” – so-called because of the
number of office staff returning to work after the Thanksgiving
break who take the opportunity to do a bit of online festive
shopping from their desks.
Industry analysts calculate that the Wal-Mart website received
more than 22.8 million unique visitors in September, making it the
21st most popular US site.
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