Yahoo! Small Business Follow Up

December 1, 2007 | In News & Announcements | 3 Comments

We’ve heard you and we’ve been hearing from our merchant partners since Monday, and I want to let you know what happened earlier this week and what we’re doing about it.

On Monday, and for a very short time yesterday, unusual service interruptions affected transactions in Yahoo! Merchant Solutions/Yahoo! Stores.

After an investigation, we learned that the specific servers affected were the Shopping Cart database servers that handle cart contents for each shopper. New servers were added to the Shopping Cart database during our pre-holiday planning to manage the projected increase in transaction volume. When the holiday traffic surged, the hardware and software settings caused these servers to experience delays when customers added items to the Shopping Cart to complete checkout. When delays exceeded time limits, customers saw error messages stating that the servers had timed out (were not responding).

On Thursday, the service interruption occurred between 10:13 a.m. and 10:25 a.m. PT. During this time, merchants’ sites could not be accessed by shoppers.

After investigating the issue on Thursday, we found that this interruption occurred due to a network configuration issue resulting from new server capacity that was added for the holiday shopping season.

Immediately upon identification of both of these issues, our team worked hard to improve the situation as quickly as possible, and systems are now performing as expected.

These service interruptions were unrelated to our October feature release.

We fixed the problems as quickly as possible, and we are continuing to make improvements to our systems including the addition of new hardware and system maintenance conducted on November 28. We will continue to post information about ongoing activities at our system status page http://updates.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/.

We have apologized to our merchant partners for the impact that this service interruption had on their business and their customers at this busy time of year. As a token of our commitment to them, we have communicated with them our intent to waive all sales transaction fees for the month of November.

The success of our merchants’ business is extremely important to us, and we are committed to work as hard as we can, over and above the efforts already underway, to avoid such issues in the future.

Rich Riley
SVP Online Channel Division, Yahoo!

3 Comments »

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  1. Just curious…twice now I have seen “We have communicated with our partners….” and yet I have not received either email. It’s probably just an email problem, maybe on my end….but this IS assuming it’s email…..can someone please clarify just How I am supposedly being contacted ?

    Comment by Pat — December 3, 2007 #

  2. Pat–These emails were sent to the email address you selected to receive emails in the Account Info of your Yahoo! Account. To see which email is set up to receive emails, click the “Account Info” link that appears under your Yahoo! ID at the top of the Store Manager. Then click “Edit Your Marketing Preferences”. Under the “Email” heading of the “How May We Contact You?” section you should see your Yahoo! email and your designated primary email address. The option that is selected is the address to which service announcements will be sent. You can select the other option or click “update my email addresses” to add and select a new email address. You may also wish to check your Bulk email folder or other folders in case you have rules that may be sending these mssages to a specific folder rather than your Inbox.

    Paul

    Comment by pboisver — December 3, 2007 #

  3. Paul, I tried what you mentioned about going into the “Account Info” link, checked my email, and checked it basically everywhere that I could within my account. I have two emails, both of which I receive usdates, emails, orders, etc. I finally heard back from Customer Support, and they told me that “THEY” had a different email address that they were using for me (4 year old one). I asked where I would be able to see it to update it, and they did not answer. Only to tell me that they updated it for me – which I again asked where I could find it to change it – no response….

    Any idea where they would have a 4 year old address on file that I could not access to see or change? And why it would be used for my emailing info to me, when it was no longer in my set up ?

    Comment by Pat — December 11, 2007 #

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