The website of retail giant Costco went down on Thanksgiving Day – one of the worst days of the year for the website to fail on.
With most of the staff at home celebrating Thanksgiving with their families, the website was down for more than 16 hours.
Expert sales aggregator Love The Sales has estimated that this downtime cost the retailer almost $11 million in lost revenue – for what would have been pre-Black Friday sales.
On a per-minute basis, the Costco pulls in around $11,035. That adds up to nearly $11 million over the majority of Thanksgiving Day when the website went down.
Users who were trying to shop on the site were met with “Sorry for the delay” messages on their screens while trying to check out.
The physical Costco stores were closed on Thanksgiving Day but the retailer had opted for an early Black Friday campaign – with many items discounted online.
However, due to the downtime, eager shoppers looking for a good discount weren’t able to check out and pay for the product deals they found.
Initially, at around 8.40 AM Eastern Time on Thursday, Costco put a banner on its website – letting online shoppers that the site was “experiencing slow response times.”
Later, the message was updated to “… experiencing longer than normal response times.”
However, Costco wasn’t the only website to experience downtime during one of its biggest shopping days.
Nordstrom Rack’s website also experienced several technical difficulties from an overloaded website as shoppers all flooded the website looking for a good deal.
