Saw this over on CNet News front page, that a slowdown prevented visitors accessing Dell"s web site. This was obviously the reason why I could not get onto their site earlier today (and could possibly be linked to the problems that one of their sales associates who I was on the phone with was alsy experiencing...)
The outage lasted several hours. and a Dell spokesman confirmed that there had been a problem, but said access had been restored to the site as of Wednesday afternoon. Dell is still working to determine the cause of the glitch which the spokesman said was most likely related to heavy traffic on the site. Mmmnnn.... Ed!)
The outage may have caused the company some financial damage, but determining how much could be tricky. "It could be tough for Dell management to gauge how much business they lost. There is always the potential that customer will be willing to come back later or tomorrow," said Brooks Gray, an analyst at Technology Business Research who estimates that Dell makes upward of $80 million per day in sales via its Web site and that particularly during the holiday season "it"s safe to say it will be losing at least a few million in potential business," he said
It does appear however that even while Dell"s home page, Dell.com, and some other parts of the site were hard to access, its Premier Pages--individual customer pages that allow companies to order PCs and other products--were not affected drastically by the glitch.