Why WalMart.com and Amazon.com went down last Friday

When I tried to access the Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE:WMT) website last Friday at about 5a.m. CST, I was quite shocked to find that the website was down for "planned maintenance."

There is no way the website of the world's largest retailer would be down for anything but catastrophic failure on the morning of the nation's largest shopping day.

I then tried to access Amazon.com later in the day only to find that it was also not accessible. What the heck was going on here? The websites for the world's largest physical retailer and the world's largest online retailer were both down at the same time on the busiest shopping day of the year? Something was terribly wrong here.

The problem is that there was no direct message to consumers that anything was in fact, "wrong." Wal-Mart's cheap attempt at a "planned maintenance" message was pretty easy to wade through. Were there really a bunch of people sitting at their computers at 5 in the morning the day after Thanksgiving? You bet -- and apparently the world's largest retailer -- which prides itself on the most robust retail IT infrastructure in the world -- apparently could not handle the glut of online shoppers invading its website for early-bird specials.

"Planning scheduled maintenance that precludes consumers from buying on one of the busiest shopping days of the year really doesn't add up," Zak Boca, president of SingleHop -- a managed hosting company -- said in a company press release. "We expect that with the predicted record influx in traffic, a large number of online retailers will be unprepared, which will result in downtime that can cost businesses thousands of dollars in lost revenue, and as seen in some high-profile cases, as much as $1 million per minute."