Further confirming that e-commerce is alive and well, the surge in online traffic triggered by the onset of the holiday season caused sporadic system outages over two days at Internet payment network PayPal.
The Palo Alto, California-based company has over four million users, and its payment service is particularly popular with those who buy and sell goods through online auctions, including Web auction giant eBay.
PayPal's troubles reportedly began on Sunday evening, when many customers found themselves shut out from the site. After becoming aware that its systems were being strained, PayPal undertook a software upgrade that lasted through Monday.
Customers Vent
Although the upgrade seems to have cooled the system meltdown, frustrated customers have flocked to Internet message boards this week to vent their complaints.
"I suggest you send an e-mail to PayPal telling them if they don't upgrade their server they will be losing your business," one auction seller wrote on an eBay forum. "They have accepted too many new customers and their site cannot handle the volume. If they realize people will be closing their accounts, they will fix the problem."
"I have a ton of auctions that I need to pay and can't do it," wrote another customer. "I've used PayPal for almost a year now and never had this problem."
E-tail Shutdowns
Over the Thanksgiving weekend, which is the traditional start of the holiday retail rush, several of the Net's largest e-tailers reported technical glitches that prevented transactions from being conducted.
Internet heavyweight Amazon.com, which had more than 1.3 million online users visit the day after Thanksgiving, experienced a 30-minute service outage that prevented shoppers from making purchases. Company executives attributed the outage to an internal computer "glitch" and said there was no way to estimate the effect of the downtime on sales.
In addition, BestBuy.com reportedly turned away some shoppers after visitors flooded the site early Friday. Some consumers also reported experiencing trouble gaining access to eToys.
Net grocer Webvan also experienced temporary outages during the week leading up to the Thanksgiving holiday.
Slow but Steady
Last week, Internet performance measurement firm Keynote Systems released a report, based on how fast pages loaded and other factors, showing that some major e-tail sites had been slowed by the increases in holiday traffic.
According to the data, Kmart's online arm BlueLight.com, EddieBauer.com and
Gap.com took twice as long to download as compared to the first week of
November.
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