This is big news about Yahoo that you’ve probably heard already (it hit CNBC and other major mainstream media outlets today), but I felt it was important to mention it here as well. I usually don’t like to cover topics that have been blogged to death, however this particular topic involves two things I am very passionate about, eCommerce and search.

So, what’s the big news? Apparently, Yahoo Merchant Solutions (formerly Yahoo Stores) had an outage which lasted roughly 14.5 hours on Monday that affected over 20,000 eCommerce merchants on the busiest shopping day of the year (Cyber Monday). The cause for the outage is not too clear, although there are reports of malicious attacks against them which may have affected their systems. Other statements and reports reveal that it may have been due to higher than expected traffic volumes over the Thanksgiving weekend, or that the routers or other system equipment may have been misconfigured. The outage and response from the downtime prompted an official apology from Rich Riley of Yahoo’s Online Channel Division.

Here’s what happened in a nut shell (a really small nutshell) as described by Rich Riley…

• On Monday at 6:00AM PT, the systems that power our merchant stores experienced outages, and shoppers of those stores were met with either error messages or they were unable to complete the checkout process.
• These issues lasted until about 1:00PM PT when, despite slow performance, transactions began going through at a much higher rate.
• By 6:00 PM PT things were back to normal and the performance of our systems was at 100%.

We deeply regret the inconvenience this caused to both our merchants and their shoppers. Our customers’ expectations were not met, nor were our own. And we are moving mountains inside Yahoo! to find out why and how this happened, and to take steps to try to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

This is all fine and good, something that should have been done from the beginning, in my opinion, but that’s neither here nor there since the damage is already done. I am glad to see them taking action and responsibility right away and the fact that they took steps to inform (even if it was minimal information) the merchants who were affected by Mondays outage.

As for the future, rest assured that we are taking the necessary steps to prepare for the peak holiday selling season. We have technical and customer relations staff mobilized and ready to support our partners.

Again, the necessary steps SHOULD have already been taken, we’ve known about the holiday shopping season since the end of last December, there’s no excuse as to why “peak holiday” time was not already taken into consideration and why it wasn’t addressed during the course of an entire year. These are things that I expect to see affecting small merchants with limited resources or knowledge, not large corporations like Yahoo (who is also a major domain register company and hosting solutions provider). Many merchants use a hosted solution so they don’t have to worry about bandwidth, server resources and up time during peak traffic times, not to do all that catalog preparation just to miss out on one of the biggest shopping days of the year.

To Yahoo’s credit, I know how hard it can be to run and manage a large volume of merchants and stores (over 40,000), but one would think that a company with that kind of brand, budget and backing wouldn’t have troubles with up time and it certainly shouldn’t be affecting as many merchants as this outage did. I feel really bad for everyone who was affected, especially the larger merchants who offer seasonal items that can only be sold during this time of year or merchants whose sales during the holidays determine their entire budget for the year to come.

This is one of the biggest eCommerce provider blunders I can remember that has affected so many peoples lives. I would hate to see someone loose their job over all of this, but I for one would like to see some DETAILED plans of actions laid out, describing how Yahoo is going to overcome these issues or keep the same things from happening again in the future. If this was indeed a malicious act against Yahoo, well, then I hope the culprit is brought to justice and is held accountable for their actions. Online sellers have enough things to worry about, I think many of them deserve to sell without having to worry whether their site and products will be available when they NEED them to be.

Sorry this happened to Yahoo, it’s really too bad. It’s something I have come to expect from service providers whose MAIN product is something other than the services they offer (meaning Yahoo is a search engine, they should do the best they can at that rather than offering services outside their scope for the sake of competing in a given marketplace, like eCommerce, hosting or domains).