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Australian Dept. Store Chain's Website Crashes and Can't Get Back Up
McGruber writes "Myer, Australia's largest department store chain, has closed its website 'until further notice' at the height of the post-Christmas (and Australian summer) sales season. The website crashed on Christmas Day and has been down ever since. This means Myer will see no benefit for those days from booming domestic online sales, which were tipped to hit $344 million across the retail sector on Boxing Day alone. Teams from IBM and Myer's information technology division were 'working furiously' to fix the problem."
Just so everyone gets the scale of the issue - Boxing Day sales are a Commonwealth tradition - started in the UK, but most countries do observe them (including Australia, Canada, New Zealand and others).
It's really the Commonwealth equivalent of Black Friday - including the traditions of sales starting the day before the event (Thanksgiving for Black Friday, Christmas for Boxing Day). It's a huge spike of traffic for most sites - I know even as little as 5 years ago - sites going down around 9PM PST were common (given most sales started at midnight) - 8:59 and the site was fine, once the clock ticked over, the sites fell over.
These days the sites do often slow down, but they stay up as many sites now employ mitigation techniques including queuing transactions to avoid overloading the SSL payment backends (they call it the checkout queue).
Of course, that was years ago, there's almost no reason why in 2013 the site should go down, nevermind going down permanently. Of course, perhaps the biggest reason is they were hacked - the best time to hack is during heavy times where systems fall over in unpredictable ways that may expose information to get at the juicy data as well as hiding in plain sight. There's really no other reason why a site would be taken down - heavy traffic is easily anticipated (It's not like you don't know when Christmas is) and accommodated.
I bet that's what really happened - they got hacked. Better to say "too much traffic!" and show incompetence that way than to show incompetence in handling customer information...
The quality of IBM has been dropping for some time, and their customers are beginning to notice. This is especially true for e-commerce applications.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
A little bit of context might help here.
Myer's is a "Bricks and Mortar" store in Australia, with stores in every major city and shopping center. Like most "Bricks and Mortar" stores here, they resisted the growing online shopping phenomenon for far too long. They are the direct opposite to the likes of Amazon.
You can add to this the massive increase in savings rates here over the last few years as a result of the world-wide debt crisis, where Australians in general tightened their belts and stopped spending. It got to the point where if something wasn't "on sale" it simply wouldn't sell at all. The stores that have done well regardless are the low margin high turn-over stores. This is not Myers.
But while Australians might have tightened their belts, there is one time of the year where they will spend more freely. Christmas. This is the big reason that boxing day sales have become huge here. It's really just taking advantage of the herds spending mentality at that time of year. And this year, finally, the belts are starting to loosen more than they have been for a few years now.
So you have this convergence of factors, where Australians are finally loosening their belts, at the time of year where they traditionally spend more freely, with a "Bricks and Mortar" store that is late to the party, and an internet sales portal that has never actually been properly stress tested.
It could be a hack, but I kind of doubt it.
As others have pointed out, Thanksgiving isn't really "a thing" in Australia, however, taking your premise that changes should not be made in the run-up to Christmas, Myer doesn't seem to have followed your suggestion. Myer changed their externally facing hosting technologies on November 27.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!