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Shoppers swamp Web sites

Wal-Mart, Amazon and Disney all get overwhelmed as cyber-buyers chase bargains.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published November 25, 2006

NEW YORK - High traffic disrupted Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s Web site for much of Friday, one of the year's busiest shopping days.

The Walt Disney Co. also had problems handling the rush of online activity Friday, while Amazon.com Inc.'s site had brief disruptions a day earlier due to a Thanksgiving Day sale on Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360 video game machines.

For much of Friday morning, attempts to open Walmart.com resulted blank pages, delays or other problems. By early afternoon, visitors were simply told to come back later.

Walmart.com spokeswoman Amy Colella blamed a "higher-than-anticipated traffic surge."

The Wal-Mart site appeared to be back to normal by midafternoon Friday, after frustrating countless potential shoppers for some 10 hours.

"People who wanted to purchase one of those plasma TVs ... they probably went to a competitor, potentially," said Ben Rushlo, senior manager of competitive research at Keynote Systems Inc.

Keynote, which regularly monitors performance at leading Web sites, said its inquiries began detecting problems about 4:30 a.m. Throughout the morning, visitors still could access portions of the site but generally ran into difficulty before completing purchases.

For instance, searches that normally take a second or two were taking 30 or 40 seconds, Rushlo said, and attempts to log in or pay for purchases sometimes generated error messages.

Rushlo said that, with the exception of Wal-Mart, online retailers were generally performing well.

He said Amazon.com's troubles were relatively small.

The site was disrupted for about 15 minutes, starting about 2 p.m. Thursday, as the retailer was offering the Xbox 360 to the first 1,000 customers for $100, or $200 below the regular retail price.

"We saw dramatically more traffic than what we anticipated," Amazon.com spokesman Craig Berman said Friday.

The Xbox sold out in 29 seconds, Berman said.

The home page of Disney's shopping site generally loaded fine, but troubles occurred "a couple of clicks into it," said Gary Foster, spokesman for DisneyShopping.com.

He said the site began to experience congestion about 9 a.m., following a record Thanksgiving Day of sales and Web traffic. He said Disney already was planning to run sales through Sunday night and expects customers to come back.

"I'm fairly certain we will make up for the loss today," he said.

[Last modified November 24, 2006, 21:00:57]