Power outage caused Lastminute crash

Lastminute.com and sister travel sites Holidayautos.co.uk and Medhotels.com crashed last week, following a problem that also affected the Sainsbury's website.

Sainsbury's, which suffered a similar problem just two weeks ago when its online grocery shopping facilities failed, was offline for an hour and a half.

The outage suffered on Friday did not affect the online grocery part of the site but did knock the homepage offline.

A spokesperson for Lastminute.com blamed a major power outage that affected its hosting company Colt for the downtime.

"We would like to apologise to our customers for any inconvenience caused, but are pleased to announce that the issues have now been resolved. We're working with our IT provider Colt to ensure this doesn't happen again," the spokesperson said.

A Sainsbury's spokeswoman told Web User that problems with its homepage were related to the issues affecting Lastminute.com. It said its online grocery service was unaffected.

The downtime from Sainsbury's drew criticism from Keynote Systems, an online perfomance monitoring firm.

"Friday lunchtime is likely to be a busy time for online shopping as workers around the country take the time to order in their food and drink for the weekend," said Martin Stern of Keynote.

According to Keynote, the first outage cost Sainsbury's £1.5m in lost business, and Stern warned that customers who were forced to find alternatives may never come back.

"Missing out on this traffic is likely to have driven many online shoppers to competitive websites, and the danger is that they simply won't come back," Stern continued.

www.lastminute.com
www.sainsburys.co.uk
www.keynote.com