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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."
Those "stupid software glitches" that you mention are the natural outcome of webbies doing what webbies do best, which is to be utterly and hopelessly clueless --- it's a result of not actually understanding how computers work under the hood. (Many are just content editors who informally picked up some PHP or Java). IBM is not immune to webbies causing chaos, because it's a disease that is endemic throughout the web industry.
You've pinpointed the problem very well by exclusion. As a rule, hardware, O/S and database developers and sysadmins are pretty skilled and experienced. Webbies on the other hand make an amoeba look intellectual, and it seems that at Myer they've succeeded at exhibiting their skills to perfection.
Once you'd ended up with a team of webbies, there is no fix short of disbanding the whole unit because webbie team managers and interviewers never hire anyone more clueful than themselves. It seems that Myer has acquired a pretty bad infestation.
Would be the best thing to do with Fosters.