Barnes & Noble Reports Web Glitches as Traffic Rises
New York, Dec. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Barnes & Noble Inc. said
its World Wide Web site slowed and it had some trouble completing
online orders for several hours yesterday because of two
technology glitches, amid a sixfold increase in traffic from six
months ago.
The company said problems started at 2:15 yesterday New York
time and were cleared up by 10 p.m. Barnes & Noble's site,
www.barnesandnoble.com, unveiled a national television ad
campaign last month featuring such best-selling authors as Tom
Clancy and Stephen King.
The company's link with First Data Corp., which provides
systems that let businesses process checks and credit cards, had
to be resynchronized because of the high volume of users setting
up accounts, which affected customers for one hour starting at
2:15, said Barnes & Noble spokesman Ben Boyd.
A second glitch began at 4:30 because of an error in its
database of accounts, which slowed down some traffic and could
have resulted in error messages for some customers, Boyd said.
That was fixed by 10 p.m., he said.
Barnes & Noble's ad campaign is part of a push to chip away
at rival Amazon.com Inc.'s customer base. Barnes & Noble said in
October that it would sell half its Internet unit to Bertelsmann
AG, the world's third-largest media company, to speed the
development of the site.
Barnes & Noble rose 1 3/4 to 32.
--Aimee Picchi in the New York newsroom (212) 318-2300 with
reporting by David Andelman in New York, through the Princeton
newsroom/jcn/gfh |
