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Saks, Sephora Sites Take Early Summer Crashes Wednesday

Written by Evan Schuman
June 24th, 2010

With summer barely two days old, two key E-tail sites—Saks Fifth Avenue and Sephora—opted to take afternoon siestas on Wednesday (June 23), site performance tracking firm Pingdom reported (and we confirmed).

Saks was down for about 90 minutes, coming back up about 4:15 PM (New York time). Given that those hours on a weekday would be an odd choice for scheduled maintenance, we asked Saks what was behind the Web absentia.

Saks spokesperson Carla Dunham E-mailed a brief statement saying that “we have decided to decline comment.” (We said it was a statement. We didn’t say it was especially illuminating.)

Sephora seems to have had a tougher time. Pingdom first detected that site’s crash at about 1:00 PM (New York time) Wednesday, and it was reported to be back up three hours later. But when we checked the site repeatedly after that—as late as 3:48 AM (New York time) Thursday—the site was still down. It was even confirmed by this wonderful little site: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com.

StorefrontBacktalk routinely tracks site downtime (we report any significant ones in our Twitter feed), and Sephora outages crop up more than any other single retailer we track. In fact, Sephora’s downtime has become legendary.

Posted in E-Commerce
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