All of Gap Inc.'s website, including Gap.com and OldNavy.com, where down for about three and half hours on Wednesday reportsInternet Retailer. The websites showed a variety of errror messages during the late afternoon outage.
Reasons for the crash were unclear. "At first the site started responding with the HTTP error code 500, which means 'internal server error,'" says Peter Alguacil, an analyst with web monitoring firm Pingdom. "Then a bit later it switched to responding with HTTP error code 503, which means 'service unavailable.' This indicates their problem wasn't related to their Internet connection, but rather that they had internal server issues on their end."
3 hours is a long time for a major online retailer to be down. It doesn't appear to have been the result of heavy traffic from any promotion Gap Inc. was running.
