Apica, a provider of load testing and performance monitoring for cloud and mobile applications, offers its list of the “Seven Most Stunning Website Failures of 2011”.
“This year’s list proves that ongoing website failures and performance problems are costing companies lost revenues and damaged reputations. As you can see, even the biggest in the business are suffering. When a website goes down, an online business has effectively shut its doors and is left wondering ‘Will that visitor ever come back?’", said Sven Hammar, Website Performance Optimization Expert and CEO for Apica. “Website failures and performance problems can be minimized greatly by simply, conducting on-going testing and monitoring to avoid being the next big failure story.”
The following high profile events and related website crashes made Apica’s “Seven Most Stunning Website Failures of 2011:”
1. Tickets for London 2012 Olympics Available for Purchase
In June, the Olympic committee announced 2.3 million tickets were available for purchase for the 2012 London Olympics. Excited fans rushed the site to find “Sorry, we can not process your request at this time” messaging because the website could not handle the rush of visitors.
2. New York City Offers Government Website for Hurricane Irene
The New York City website crashed amid overwhelming visitor volume encouraged by Mayor Michael Bloomberg who strongly urged the public to use the website for information on Hurricane Irene in August.
3. Target.com Launches Missoni Collection
The much anticipated launch of the Missoni Collection at Target in September was a huge failure when the Target.com site crashed due to high traffic, rendering the entire website inoperable for hours. Target experienced a repeat crash performance six weeks later when another rush of visitors hit the site.
4. Apple Launches iPhone 4S
In early October, iPhone 4S became available for purchase at the Apple Store. Huge spikes in website traffic throughout the day either downed the site or slowed it considerably, effectively halting tens of thousands of new phone purchases.
5. Bank of America Announces Monthly Fee for Debit Card Purchases
Bank of America’s website slowed considerable for 5 days in October when it was hit hard by customers flocking to the site after the banking giant announced it would be charging a $5 monthly fee for account holders who make purchases with their bank debit cards.
6. Disney Store Launches Limited Edition Princess Dolls
Disney.com crashed repeatedly due to high visitor volumes when it launched its limited edition of its princess dolls collection in October. Simple proactive testing for enormous peak loads for an expected "big seller" and this situation would be easily avoided.
7. H&M Launches New Versace Collection
Shoppers looking to purchase the new Versace Collection from H&M’s website in November were greeted with “We’re sorry, we are experiencing large number of visitors at the moment, please try again later” messaging.
Hot Topic
The Latest
In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ...
In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...
When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...
Many organizations assumed their infrastructure strategy was settled. It had been implemented, optimized and built into long-term plans. Recent changes in technology and vendor consolidation are forcing a second look. Cloud outages and licensing changes have exposed how much dependency exists on a small number of platforms. As a result, organizations are reevaluating whether those decisions still hold up under current conditions ...
Edge AI is strategically embedded in core IT and infrastructure spending across industries, according to the 2026 Edge AI Survey from ZEDEDA. The research shows that 83% of C-suite and IT executive respondents say edge AI is important to their core business strategy ...
As AI adoption accelerates, operational complexity — not model intelligence — is becoming the primary barrier to reliable AI at scale, according to the State of AI Engineering 2026 from Datadog ... The report highlights a compounding complexity challenge as AI systems scale ... Around 5% of AI model requests fail in production, with nearly 60% of those failures caused by capacity limits ...
For years, production operations teams have treated alert fatigue as a quality-of-life problem: something that makes on-call rotations miserable but isn't considered a direct contributor to outages. That framing doesn't capture how these systems fail, and we now have data to show why. More importantly, it's now clear alert fatigue is a symptom of a deeper issue: production systems have outgrown the current operational approaches ...
I was on a customer call last fall when an enterprise architect said something I haven't been able to shake. Her team had just spent four months trying to swap one AI vendor for another. The original plan said three weeks. "We didn't switch vendors," she told me. "We rebuilt half our integrations and discovered what we'd actually been depending on." Most enterprise leaders don't expect that to be the experience ...
Ask any senior SRE or platform engineer what keeps them up at night, and the answer probably isn't the monitoring tool — it's the data feeding it. The proliferation of APM, observability, and AIOps platforms has created a telemetry sprawl problem that most teams manage reactively rather than architect proactively. Metrics are going to one platform. Traces routed somewhere else. Logs duplicated across multiple backends because nobody wants to be caught without them when something breaks. Every redundant stream costs money ...
80% of respondents agree that the IT role is shifting from operators to orchestrators, according to the 2026 IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous IT from SolarWinds ...