News Room






November 9, 2005
Best Buy on the blink

No. 1 electronics retailer Web site sees mid-day shutdown; online ordering option unavailable.

By Parija Bhatnagar, CNN/Money staff writer

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Electronics retailer Best Buy's online store shut down mid-day Wednesday in what at least one Web site monitoring firm is calling an "unplanned outage."

According to Ken Godskind, vice president of marketing for AlertSite.com, Bestbuy.com displayed a store unavailable page that the AlertSite's system first recognized at 12:36 p.m. ET.

The Web site was still displaying the same store unavailable page at 2:00 p.m. ET.

However, a message on the Web site said "We are making updates to our online store. Please come back soon. Use the links below to learn about in-store specials and more. We apologize for the inconvenience."

"Usually updates are done very early in the morning and not in the middle of the day," said Godskind. "My guess is that this is an unplanned outage and the message on the Web site is a graceful reaction to an unplanned event. It's not something retailers want to see happening close to the holiday shopping season."

Best Buy (Research) was not immediately available for comment.