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Shopping Craze Goes Online and Blocks Popular Sites

Last Friday was one of the year`s busiest shopping days, as "Black Friday" marks the high point of the shopping season. This year, the shopping frenzy reached cyber space as well, and Wal-Mart reported that high traffic disrupted its online website during most of the day. The report comes only one day after Amazon indicated that a massive number of users tried to log onto the site in order to enjoy a Thanksgiving Day sale on Microsoft`s Xbox 360, and cause interferences with that site`s operation.

During most of Friday`s morning, users were unable to access Wal-Mart`s website and encountered blank pages when trying. Analysts say that such glitches have tremendous impact on retailers. If someone is looking to buy something, and can`t get it in one place, he will surely buy the product from someone else. Wal-Mart`s connection problems resulted in losing sales, that`s for sure. From now on, retailers will probably re-estimate the affect of busy shopping days on the online presence of users.

According to an online statistics company, Wal-Mart`s websites is the 21 most popular sites in the United States, and enjoyed about 2.2 million unique visits in September. This means that the company lost many costumers on Friday, when most of the site was unavailable, and the parts that were accessible operated extremely slowly. Amazon`s problems were relatively small compared with Wal-Mart`s problem. Currently both sites are fully operational and there are no issues expected in the near future.