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Lights, Camera, Inaction! Blockbuster.com Stumbles Friday. Walgreens, Too

Written by Evan Schuman
August 29th, 2009

As the summer is winding down, many consumers want to relax with a good video. But if they tried doing it with Blockbuster.com on Friday (Aug. 28), they would have likely gotten a headache instead and wanted to pop an aspirin. Alas, a visit to Walgreens.com might not have helped. Web traffic monitoring services showed both sites crashing on Friday.

Blockbuster was the first to glitch, with Pingdom reporting the entertainment site becoming unresponsive at 1:43 PM New York time and staying down for 18 minutes. It was reported back down again at 3:11 PM New York time and it stayed down for 32 minutes. It then was reported down again at 3:57 PM and stayed down for 11 minutes.

Another prominent Web site monitoring service, Dotcom-Monitor, also reported the initial Blockbuster outage (at about 1:45 PM Friday, New York time), but it did not detect the others.

Blockbuster’s troubles continued into Saturday (Aug. 29), with Pingdom reporting a half-dozen more Blockbuster.com outages.

Dotcom-Monitor saw significant problems with Walgreens.com, starting at 2:24 PM Friday (Aug. 28) New York time and lasting for more than two hours, ending at 4:37 PM. Dotcom-Monitor reported a very brief outage from Walgreens on Saturday morning (Aug. 29) as well.

The Walgreens problems resulted in a series of timed-out page requests along with “unable to connect to the remote server” issues.

Posted in E-Commerce
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