Gap sites go down on Presidents' Day

All Gap-branded web sites, including those for Old Navy and Banana Republic, went down for at least three hours Monday, according to web site monitoring firm AlertBot. A spokeswoman for Gap confirmed that outages occurred but offered few details.

The problems began at approximately 1:45 p.m. Eastern time Monday, with the sties unavailable until 4 p.m., says AlertBot sales and marketing manager Justin Noll. He says the sites also experienced similar problems last night, between 7:10 p.m. and 8:20 p.m.

“Visitors were redirected to an error page that was displayed stating the site was temporarily unavailable,” he says. “But this is very unusual for a retailer to take down its site on a Monday afternoon, especially on Presidents' Day when many consumers have off and are shopping online.”

The Gap spokeswoman did not confirm the exact times of the outages, and gave no details about their cause. “Unfortunately, yesterday we experienced temporary technical issues on our web sites, which we worked quickly to resolve,” she says. “We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused our customers.”

Gap Inc. Direct is No. 24 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide.

At the upcoming Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition 2012, Kevin Diamond, chief technology officer for HauteLook, and Lelah Manz, chief strategist for commerce at Akamai Technologies Inc., will speak in a session entitled “My web site is down! Why the Internet doesn’t always work and what this means for your business.”