Best Buy tech blunder: Site suffers outages on Black Friday

By Mike Flacy November 28, 2014

best-buy-down

Definitely one of the worst days of the year for any retail e-commerce site to fail, Best Buy’s official retail site went down twice today. The first outage occurred around 9 a.m. ET on Black Friday morning and lasted approximately two hours. The second outage occurred around 5:30 ET and also lasted a significant length of time. In addition to the site outage for both desktop and mobile visitors, the Best Buy mobile application was also not working.

According to a statement released to Re/code, a Best Buy rep indicated that the outage was related to mobile traffic. Specifically, the rep said “A concentrated spike in mobile traffic triggered issues that led us to shut down BestBuy.com in order to take proactive measures to restore full performance.”

Best Buy customers voiced their unhappiness about the site outage on both the company’s Facebook page as well as Twitter. During both outages, the @BestBuySupport Twitter account was extremely proactive about speaking with customers about the upcoming return of the site.

While Best Buy hasn’t officially released sales numbers regarding revenue generated during the kickoff of the sales on Thanksgiving, it’s highly likely that traffic spiked over Thanksgiving 2013 as many analysts predicted strong growth in online sales this year. Since this trend is only more likely to continue as more consumers shift from in-store shopping to online shopping, it’s likely that Best Buy will have to significantly improve site capacity before next year’s holiday sales in order to avoid similar issues.

Of course, Best Buy wasn’t the only site to suffer difficulties today. Hewlett-Packard’s shopping outlet went down today for a period of time and Nike had trouble processing orders on the company’s online store. During 2013, Walmart had similar site issues on Thanksgiving Day causing some shoppers to wait as much as two hours to complete the checkout process.

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By day, I'm the content and social media manager for High-Def Digest, Steve's Digicams and The CheckOut on Ben's Bargains…

Social Media

How to use social media and save on Small Business Saturday

small business saturday

Between Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the unending onslaught of online deals, there is another holiday shopping day that might get lost in the shuffle: Small Business Saturday. This year marks the second annual such event, a new tradition that tries to steal some addition from chain retailers and big e-commerce sites and give it to local vendors.
And this year, the fledging ritual is getting some serious attention from social media sites. Facebook, Twitter, and Google have all pledge their efforts in support, offering and encouraging small business owners to use their sites’ tools to promote shopping this weekend.
Local retailers aren’t the only ones who stand to benefit this weekend. What happens to consumers who want the discounts but sans the chain names (that are sometimes attached to controversy) they go hand in hand with? Small business Saturday can fill that void along with the help of some geo-social applications.
Foursquare
Foursquare has been at the top of the social-meets-location game since it began, and Small Business Saturday will be no exception. If you have an American Express card, sync it to your Foursquare account following these directions. Then when you check-in to shops who have partnered with the service via Foursquare on Saturday, you will see a button that says “load to card.” Then when you spend at least $25 or more at the participating store, you’ll get a notification saying $25 was credited to your Amex account. American Express is a sponsor of Small Business Saturday, so ratcheting up sales is in its best interest, but turns out they’re willing to compensate you for helping make the event a success.
Etsy
The purveyor of all things handcrafted is a natural fit for small business Saturday—and will appeal to those who want to buy “local” without leaving their living rooms. Just searching “Small Business Saturday” on the site brought up a slew of items that will be on sale this weekend, and this blog catalogued some of the best e-shops on the site that offered discounts last year.
Daily deal sites
While the likes of LivingSocial and Groupon tend to offer food and spa deals, the occasional local retailer pops up. Between now and Small Business Saturday, a minimal amount of homework and creating an account with one (or all) of these sites could save you some Monday. We'd advise getting with something like The Dealmix, which collects a large variety of all these local deals. Keep an eye out on any of these applications for vendor or shop deals in your area. Then make a call or check Facebook to see if they are participating in Small Business Saturday. Then add those savings to whatever discount the daily deal site was offering. Of course, you should check that you can use coupons during the Saturday sale.
Facebook
Facebook is offering a slew of tools for small businesses to take advantage of, but the site is also catering to consumers. Check out the Small Business Saturday Facebook page and you’ll have access to a variety of information, including city guides for optimizing your local shopping in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, as well as organized events in cities nationwide. Some of them include raffles, free gift wrapping, Santa visits for the kids, and community breakfasts.
Twitter
Be sure to follow your favorite local business on Twitter, if you haven’t already. We’re sure a great many of these sites will have implemented a Follow button (one of the tools in the Small Business Saturday kid), and will be using the hashtags #ShopSmall, #ShopSmallNov26, #SmallBizSaturday and #SmallBusinessSaturday to spread word of their discounts this weekend.

Computing

Black Friday online spending up 9 percent

Americans are back to doing what we do best these days: shopping. ComScore has released its first report on U.S. online holiday spending and it's up significantly compared to last year, with Amazon.com leading the flurry of growth. Online sales from Nov. 1-26 increased 13 percent, rising from $10.3 billion to $11.6 billion. Thanksgiving Day, a traditionally slow day for sales, made a dramatic gain of 28 percent, and Black Friday sales rose 9 percent.

"Although Black Friday is known for the flurry of activity occurring in brick-and-mortar retail stores, online shopping is increasingly becoming the refuge of those preferring to avoid the crowds and long lines," said comScore chairman, Gian Fulgoni. "The $648 million in online spending this Black Friday represents the heaviest online spending day of the season-to-date and a solid increase over last year’s Black Friday. Interestingly, we are also seeing consumers beginning to buy online in a more meaningful way on Thanksgiving Day, which has historically seen low buying activity."

Mobile

Skype now supports 911 calls in the U.S.

iPhone with the Skype mobile app loading screen.

Skype has updated its mobile and desktop apps to allow emergency calling in the U.S. for the first time in its 18-year history. Calls to 911 are also possible via Skype’s web-based service, notes for the recently released Skype 8.80 showed.

Emergency calling from Skype could come in handy if you find yourself in a tricky situation without a phone but have a computer close by, or if phone lines are down but you can get online.