Technical Difficulties

So, you thought today would be a good day to do some online holiday shopping on your lunch hour, huh? Eh, think again. The entire Gap family of sites, including Old Navy and Banana Republic, was down for about two hours, though it appears that they are now back online. Hilariously, they all posted pages claiming the sites were down for "scheduled maintenance." Maybe it really was scheduled, but somehow I doubt it.

The J. Crew site is still showing a "stay tuned" page after about three hours, with a pseudo-apology that says "even the best sites aren't perfect." Um, is that supposed to be some sort of excuse? Because it's only one of the busiest online shopping days of the year (which companies like you have helped create and promote), and it's not like you can say you didn't know your site was going to see a lot of traffic today.

But I'm not exactly surprised; J. Crew made some changes to their site several months ago, and it's been kinda verkakte (to borrow a Yiddish colloquialism) ever since. Just this weekend, I was still coming across products on their site with images that were not displaying properly. (I actually used to get paid to find and fix such errors for a much smaller company, so I know they gotta have at least a couple of people on the payroll somewhere who are supposed to be doing the same thing.)

If any of you come across other sites that are down, let me know and I'll post it here, as a public service.