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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."
Another company that sees its IT department as a cost center only and not a part of the company responsible for bringing in revenue?
Now, perhaps, its management will have another thought about that, but probably not -- probably they are thinking about assigning blame and who should get fired.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
And I can't get up!
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
They should check the free drive space. Bam -- that one's on the house. You're welcome.
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...
They mentioned "teams from IBM" .... this wasn't a V7000 Unified that died on the backend, was it? :)
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
... I think I see the problem.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I am sure they are happier with customers coming to their stores.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Are you trying to say that Myer's website got...knocked out?
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
It's working perfectly. If it's not, it's just a 'glitch'.
It'll be working fine in an hour, or a year from now, but if it isn't, use this toll-free number.
That I'm right, and you don't like it, doesn't mean I'm a troll.
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.
No. Australia has a small IT market and you don't want a black mark against your name. Also, Myer don't need help stuffing up. This is the company which held out against supporting credit cards in favour of their own in house card system for **years**.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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. "
1. Meyer's is doomed. It's imploding and will fail.
2. They should have never tried to do have a post Christmas online sale in the first place. It was always going to fail.
3. The website failure is 100% conclusive evidence that post Christmas online sales are wrong.
4. The people who came up with the idea are evil and want to destroy their customers, but the website failure saved people from ruin. Now they need to heed the warning and make sure that Meyers fails to protect themselves in the future.
5. Even thought other commercial websites are working (just like some state run healthcare sites) all post Christmas web sites are just as intrinsically evil and bad for users and they should all be dismantled before they ruin everything.
All these, and all the other criticisms of Healthcare.gov, all sound really crazy when applied to this similar situation, don't they? This might be a clue that this kind of hysterical reaction is equally foolish when applied to the Healthcare.gov rollout problems.
Note how much hysterical reaction this receives and you can see the full process unfolds in miniature.
Why is Snark Required?
I wonder what kind of Xmas Bonuses the IT team can expect
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
websites are down :P
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.
IBM believed it could cut every corner and go the cheap labor route and nobody would notice while their profits soared. They are wrong.
www.myer.com.au says it is running: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
Page Title: MYER
Additionally, it mentioned the following:
Accept-Ranges : bytes;
Content-Length : 12726;
Content-Type : text/html;
Date : Sat, 28 Dec 2013 07:53:26 GMT;
ETag : "054e9c0693cf1:0";
Last-Modified : Sat, 28 Dec 2013 01:11:36 GMT;
X-Powered-By : ASP.NET
Better than getting knocked up. Imagine a preggy web site...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
In An interview with Myers CEO, he said a small percentage of their sales are online, so they will not miss too much.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
turning it off and on again?
IBM cut numbers savagely in Oz and shipped the jobs to China without adequate time for handover. They've had some utterly spectacular fuckups since then including a cost blowout of hundreds of millions on a the payroll system of a State government health department.
Someone's job is on the line.
Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead
How high you ask? Example - Scarpa hiking boots - $125US online from Italy (where they are made) or the USA. "On special" in Australia for $450US, normal price most likely higher. That's why we shop online.
... put up a Yahoo Store (or something similar), in the meantime.
Get a subset of your products out there, at least. Use a CMS and eBay to check out. Whatever it takes! Get something out there.
Make it clear that this is a stop gap measure, pardon our dust, whatever. But c'mon. People who sell scrapbooking supplies out of their basement are selling them online. You can at least get the functionality out there while you fix or build something for your real offering.
Much of what IBM is pushing these days is third party software they bought and renamed "Websphere Enterprise Blah Blah Blah Solution". It's overpriced, slow, buggy, and very difficult to integrate. The company I work for was an IBM partner until we threw them out, we're now transitioning to open source alternatives.
With a mistake like that how do we know you are not Lion :)
Why are you bothering to post when you clearly know so little about the issue? It would be like me telling you that sales around Thanksgiving are a bad idea. This is the local version of your "Black Friday" sale and the entire retail industry here is doing it.
Please find out SOMETHING about the topic at hand before you try to use it to push your own barrow.
Things like the Myer's web site?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
They're not engineers, obviously. So they're technicians. Software Engineers are not 'IT.' IT is the data janitors. The modern equivalent of file clerks and the custodians who dust the file cabinets in a traditional office.
It infuriates some of us who have careers in Engineering when a recruiter or HR moron refers to us as 'IT.'
Didn't Sears used to do that. I remember walking away from a $200 pile of random merchandise when I got to the till and was told "Sorry we only take Sears cards". - "OK then, I guess I'll buy this somewhere else/"
You can cut fat for just so long before you cut muscle and bone. They were on the verge of death in the 1990's, we'll have to see if they can reinvent themselves once again.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Further, since the initial cost of cutting too deep is loss of resilience, it's easy to go beyond the point of no return without noticing.
It was already broken before Christmas, I happened to go on their site the day before and even a simple search failed, category pages didn't load in a timely way and things were just visibly bad... As they have been for so long. Months ago we had a click-frenzy promotion, an attempt to have an Australian black-Friday situation and a number of web sites failed in the deluge of visitors, including at that time.. Myer.
This is a systemic problem and as a web tester I have a fair idea what is going on. The system selected and used for e-commerce is slow, the amount of legacy systems it links to and depends on is huge and when under pressure it will fail. It's not a matter of fixing it or simply throwing more technology at it, this will in fact make it worse. They don't penetration test, they are not secure, they are not up to the task of handling decent (and expected) consumer clicks and traffic, they will continue to waste money and prestige going down this path. This is another healthcare.org
Companies such as Myer here in Australia are complaining about their online competition and that they are losing sales to this new opportunity, other companies are making successful inroads into the sales market here because their sites work and provide a solution to consumer demand, the Australian retail and department store logic is to provide an over-priced and costly system that fails, reduce sales and support staff in the stores and then complain to the government that they have no protection against this competition.
Further, since the initial cost of cutting too deep is loss of resilience, it's easy to go beyond the point of no return without noticing.
A deeply insightful comment. Finding a balance here is obviously the goal but as I've no idea how to measure resilience (at a company level) this seems to me like a non-trivial challenge for a juggernaut like IBM.
No excuses though - IBM at least has the money and the clout to approach the problem intelligently and figure this out for themselves.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Usually when a system problem becomes a long playing catastrophe it is because there is either no backup or the backup is not restorable. ---------------- Steve Stites
Smarter Motherfucking Planet, My Ass. Company is run by executive pirates who work for themselves and only themselves. Ginni Rometty is this century's John Akers.
If there is a good way to measure corporate resilience, I have never heard of it. Absent that, the best approach is to accept that 100% efficiency is not sustainable and instead aim for 10% more production people than you believe would be 100% efficient.
The 10% is pulled right out of thin air. If production demand is highly volatile, 10% may not be enough.
The same sort of policy should probably be applied to JIT logistics as well before we get to the point that a single flat tire can crash civilization.