Macy's Suffers Credit Card Slowdown on Black Friday
Macy's confirmed on Friday that it was suffering a credit card slowdown on one of the busiest and most important shopping days of the year. That trouble was resolved by Friday evening. "We have fully resolved today's system issues. We highly value our customers and sincerely apologize for any inconvenience today's system slowdown may have caused during their shopping experience," a spokesperson for Macy's said, according to CNBC. The retailer attributed the processing "delays" to "a capacity-related issue" and said it doesn't expect the glitch to have any financial impact. Word began percolating on social media around noon ET on Friday from shoppers across the country, many whom said they didn't end up purchasing goods they were about to purchase because of the slowdown. Macy's began responding to complaints on social media a little after 1:00 p.m. ET, asking users having trouble to direct message it.
Total Retail's Take: While Macy's was having problems in-store on Black Friday, other retailers were experiencing issues with their websites. According to digital experience intelligence provider Catchpoint, H&M had two complete website outages over the holiday weekend: the first occurred on Thursday between 5:30-6:30 p.m. EST and the second around 4:30 a.m. EST on Friday. Lowe's experienced partial outages (i.e., the site was accessible from some locations, but inaccessible from others), beginning at 9 a.m. ET on Friday. The Gap's e-commerce site slowed down drastically between 11 a.m. - 1:30 p.m. EST Thursday, with some load times between 11 seconds to 30 seconds. The average load time for the "Catchpoint Top 50” retail sites (both desktop and mobile) was less than found seconds, which Catchpoint said was good overall.
