Truth In Downtime?
from the a-little-honesty,-please dept
Stories of websites going down under heavy loads are nothing new. Sites on launch day. Shopping sites on sale days. News sites on big news stories days. However, if a site is going to go down, it might as well be honest about it. However, when Hallmark's site went down today, on Valentine's Day, they put up a message suggesting they were "doing a bit of housecleaning" rather than admitting they were overwhelmed (and/or unprepared). Who do they think they're fooling? Wouldn't they have just been better off admitting what was wrong so people had a real idea of what to expect? Update: It looks like they later changed the message to read: "Valentine's Day is keeping us extra busy, and that means our store is full right now."
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Default Response by Justin Hollabaugh on Feb 14th, 2005 @ 4:24pm
It was probably just a default failover message that automatically responds when the main service is unavailable.
I sincerely doubt that anyone at Hallmark (or under contract to Hallmark) actively posted a message today saying that they were just doing a bit of housecleaning.
That said, they probably should have worded the message differently. But being the warm and fuzzy company that Hallmark is I can see why "Doing a little house cleaning" was chosen over "The website is currently unavailable. This can be caused by many things such as high internet traffic or planned maintenance, please try your request again later."
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