A number of major retailers have been hit with downtime and glitches in their online systems in the leadup to the busiest retail period of the year.
Several of the US Postal Services online tools failed under the load of large amounts of traffic and a glitch that is still being identified. A statement on the USPS web site says:
"The Postal Service has experienced intermittent system interruptions on usps.com.
We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused. We are hopeful
that full service, across the country, will be restored as soon as
possible. We thank you again for your patience."
The popular Click and Ship service, which presumably would be very popular during the festive season seems to have been most severely hit. A USPS spokesman says:
"There's a glitch somewhere in the system, and this is our busiest time
of the year," said Woods. "We're still trying to pinpoint the cause. We
think we're very close to finding a solution. ... We understand
customers are frustrated. We're frustrated. We're working 24 hours to
find a solution."
Sears, Bloomingdale's and Saks Fifth Avenue have all experienced outages.
"Keynote Systems Inc., a San Mateo, Calif.-based Web monitoring company, said Sears.com was mostly unavailable on the day after Thanksgiving between 10 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. Eastern time, and again between 1:30 p.m. and 5 p.m.
Sears acknowledged that its site was hit with "intermittent interruptions" on that day because of "higher-than-anticipated peak volumes." A spokesman said last week that the site was fully functional and that technicians were monitoring traffic volumes. "
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