Pingdom Home

US + international: +1-212-796-6890

SE + international: +46-21-480-0920

Business hours 3 am-11:30 am EST (Mon-Fri).

Pingdom Blog

Royal Pingdom

Ramblings from the Pingdom team about the Internet and web tech

RSS Feed

GAP.com crashed on Cyber Monday

Cyber Monday saw slowdown and minor issues for several e-commerce websites. A standout was the GAP website which was completely unavailable for a total of 1 hour and 25 minutes.

Gap.com crashed at 11:37 a.m. EST, responding only with a HTTP 500 server error (internal server error).

Twenty minutes later, GAP put up a maintenance page with the words, “We’re updating our site to bring you a better shopping experience. Gap.com is temporarily closed for scheduled site improvements.” (Screenshot below.)

Almost 40 minutes later the website came back up, but only very briefly. It didn’t stabilize until 1:06 p.m. EST.

The GAP website had another outage at 10:40 p.m., lasting just 5 minutes this time.

If the standout incident on Black Friday was the Sears.com downtime, the Gap.com incident may very well have been the one for Cyber Monday.

Want to test your site every minute?








You will get an email with your login information.

No news is good news for the Super Bowl website

The New England Patriots held what seemed to be a commanding lead (17-15) with five minutes left of Super Bowl XLVI last night. But the New York Giants came back and managed to win with 21-17.

As exciting as the game sounds, we missed the whole thing, instead spending our time watching the Superbowl.com website.

It turned out to be a rather dull thing to do because the site held up well and there was no downtime at all. The response time also didn’t give away anything significant in terms of online Super Bowl traffic.

Read more

As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.

Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

Read more

Weekend must-read articles #2

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

Read more

Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

Read more

Pingdom Podcast #5

Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff.

In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending submission of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We’re also joined by Mario Lurig, who talks about using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront to speed up a website.

Read more