Yahoo! suffered glitches on Cyber Monday

Yahoo Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) experienced some technical glitches yesterday during Cyber Monday, the day when the nation goes online for holiday shopping deals. Those survivors from last week's Black Friday caught up with specials Monday, but the torrent of internet traffic may have been too much for Yahoo! to handle, according to internet traffic firm comScore.

Yahoo! itself was not really front-and-center in the glitches yesterday, but since the web firm hosts shopping services for many smaller merchants, those are the ones that were hit. On its website for small business accounts, Yahoo! stated that "Some merchants are reporting that shoppers are receiving an error message indicating 'system unavailable' during the checkout process. We are aware of this issue and are currently investigating." Sounds reassuring during one of the heaviest online shopping days of the year, right?

Standard lines such as "working toward a solution" and "heavy holiday traffic" were offered by Yahoo! executives, but it remains to be seen whether this is enough for online merchants relying on one of the largest web networks to provide the backend for customer sales and transaction fulfillment. On a competitive note, no glitches have been reported from Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) as of today. The company has been known to have glitches as well (every web firm does from time to time), but it's a test of technical mettle if things operate perfectly on Cyber Monday.