Costco, Nordstrom Rack Websites Crash From Early Black Friday Traffic
Late Wednesday night/early Thursday morning, both Nordstrom Rack and Costco were experiencing issues with their websites as consumers frantically shopped the Black Friday deals in advance. Business Insider was first alerted to these site crashes by web optimization company Yottaa. Consumers have taken to social media to complain that they were unable to complete orders online due to the outages. Facebook and Instagram were also impacted by fairly widespread outages on Thanksgiving. Business Insider's Sinéad Baker found that nearly 4,000 users had reported issues with Instagram as of Thursday morning, citing data from outage-tracking website Down Detector.
Total Retail's Take: This is a story we seemingly report every holiday season. No matter how much (or little) testing retailers do to prepare their websites for the surge in traffic over Black Friday weekend, it's inevitable that some won't be up to the challenge. This has both short- and long-term negative ramifications. In the short term there's the obvious loss in potential revenue, and long term a loss in brand trust can impact future sales. To help appease upset shoppers, Costco announced that it will extend Thanksgiving Day promotions. Whether that will be enough to win back upset shoppers, who may have moved on to a competitor upon landing on Costco's crashed site, remains to be seen.
