Burlington goes offline without warning

Burlington , N.J. Burlington Coat Factory’s Web site went dark on Wednesday with no advance warnings to its online customer base, according to a report by Storefront Backtalk.

The retailer took its Web site offline all day Nov. 18 for a planned outage as it performed an extensive hardware and database upgrade.

In what a senior company official conceded was an oversight, the 430-store chain failed to publish any ahead-of-time advisories before yanking its e-commerce site’s plug in the wee hours, according to the report.

Nor did it post much in the way of an explanatory statement during the long downtime period that followed.

“The Burlington Coat Factory site is temporarily unavailable. Please check back later,” was the extent of the message presented to visitors while the site was down.

Burlington Coat Factory supervisor of Web development Jack Follansbee acknowledged the blunder and said that the retailer should have told visitors when its site was expected to return.

The outage had been planned to start Tuesday night and last all day Wednesday and into the early morning hours of Thursday, Follansbee said. “Wednesday is actually the lowest revenue day for our Web site,” he said.

The need for the upgrade was due to sporadic, short-lived outages as early as Monday, according to site-monitoring companies Dotcom-Monitor and Alert-Bot.

Follansbee said the site was actually taken down at 10:00 p.m. EST Tuesday and was targeted to be back up at 2:00 a.m. EST.

The effort was to perform a major upgrade to the chain’s Oracle Application Server in addition to “a complete hardware and software refresh of our e-commerce platform,” including an operating system upgrade and “getting off some old disk arrays that we’ve been trying to retire,” Follansbee said. “Everything is being refreshed.”

Internal projections had the database upgrade alone taking 19 hours.