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."
Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  1. icon
    Justin Hollabaugh (profile), 14 Feb 2005 @ 4:24pm

    Default Response

    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."

    link to this | view in thread ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.