10/07/10
Each problem persisted for more than an hour, web monitoring firms say.
Thad Rueter , Senior Editor
The e-commerce sites operated by Gap Inc. and CVS Caremark Corp. both crashed this week, according to web site monitoring firms.
The Gap site went down Monday at about 9:20 a.m. Eastern time, says a spokesman for Alertbot, a site performance and measuring firm. “The web site started loading very slowly, taking over 11 seconds to load,” he says. “The problem only continued to get worse with intermittent time-out errors.”
The issue persisted until 12:30 p.m.
Pingdom, another web site monitoring firm, confirmed the crash but could not offer much detail.
The CVS site went down Monday at about 1:50 p.m. Eastern, the Alertbot spokesman says. “There was a time-out error, meaning the server responded very slow and was unable to send the entire HTTP page within the 30-second limit,” the spokesman says. “Within 10 minutes, the error changed to the connection being closed by CVS's network, which can be caused by a number of different network errors.”
The web site was brought back up by 3 p.m.
Neither Gap, No. 23 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, nor CVS, No. 73, offered immediate comment.