NewEgg faceplants Web site on Cyber Monday?

[jgreco]

Looks like they've got Akamai mapping "http://www.newegg.com/*" to http://promotions.newegg.com/NEemail/Nov-0-2015/CyberMonday_S-a-l-e_30/index-landing.html

"Oops." I kinda envision that there's some panic going on over in NewEgg's engineering department.

 

[jgreco]

This is frickin' hilarious.

Code:

> telnet www.newegg.com 80
Trying 107.14.45.72...
Connected to a607.g.akamai.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET http://www.newegg.com/random-bullshit HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.0 302 Moved Temporarily
Server: AkamaiGHost
Content-Length: 0
Location: http://promotions.newegg.com/NEemail/Nov-0-2015/CyberMonday_S-a-l-e_30/index-landing.html
Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2015 22:57:44 GMT
Connection: close

Connection closed by foreign host.

Okay, so they've told Akamai to rewrite (AFAICT) *ALL* URL's on their site to redirect to the promotions site. The links on the promotions site link BACK to www.newegg.com, which of course redirects back ... to the promotions page.

Now the thing that's horrifying, to me, is that this is Cyber Monday, which has GOT to be one of NewEgg's biggest days of the year, and they've been telling people for like 12 hours now to "try disabling your adblocker" or "clear your cache" or "try IE" when none of these things have anything to do with the problem.

CAN SOMEONE PLEASE CLUE ME IN ON HOW YOU CAN HAVE A MAJOR INTERNET RETAIL OPERATION WITH NO ONE WHO CAN ANALYZE A BASIC CONFIGURATION ERROR LIKE THIS FOR AN ENTIRE BUSINESS DAY?!?!?!?!

Holy a$$crackers Batman.

 

[jgreco]

The even funnier part is that their website does appear to be available over at 204.14.213.160 but I'm far too lazy to go "fix" it for them in our web cache here.

 

[pirateghost]

the mobile app has been working fine today. ;)

 

[jgreco]

It was working for awhile, but I think that some cached content expired and it stopped working too.

The part that I don't get is that they seem incapable of analyzing the issue to resolve it. This is like "Remedial Basic Webmastering 097" coursework level stuff.

 

[jgreco]

the mobile app has been working fine today. ;)

Seems like it only lets you look at the featured content.

 

[joeschmuck]

I was on NewEgg earlier this morning at work without issue (~5AM ET).

 

[jgreco]

Yeah, they put the Cyber Monday page up around 7AM this morning and all hell broke loose. Check Twitter. It looks like they finally pulled the redirect and suddenly the web site works ("who-da-thunk???")

The pricing on the Intel 535 480GB's at $139 is pretty damn good and I've been buying up some.

 

[Fuganater]

You are such a nerd lol.

 

[jgreco]

You are such a nerd lol.

Why, thanks. What is the basis for saying that, that I'm able to chat with an HTTP server?

 

[Fuganater]

Yes. The fact that you had to dissect why it was a faceplant is just too funny.

 

[anodos]

Honestly, I find this somewhat disconcerting. If if took that long to diagnose and fix a glaringly obvious problem, I wonder what other stuff they might be missing.

But I won't stop using them, but thanks to anthem, etal, my info is already stuck in the tubes, and I'm a sucker for good deals on computer parts.

 

[jgreco]

Yes. The fact that you had to dissect why it was a faceplant is just too funny.

Actually it's a little hard to know for sure. My *suspicion* is what they intended to happen was to have "http://www.newegg.com/" redirect to the promotions page, but either fat fingered it by adding an asterisk at the end, or maybe Akamai took it to mean that. The other option is that they were trying to force a cookie at people who had seen the promotions page, then letting them into the main web site if they had the magic cookie, which would basically be a dolt move because people block cookies in various ways.

I actually waited quite some time to see if it would resolve before I looked at it a little more closely, because sometimes our UTM or cache get involved in odd ways. I only became convinced it was fundamentally broken after poking at it with telnet.

 

[jgreco]

Honestly, I find this somewhat disconcerting. If if took that long to diagnose and fix a glaringly obvious problem, I wonder what other stuff they might be missing.

But I won't stop using them, but thanks to anthem, etal, my info is already stuck in the tubes, and I'm a sucker for good deals on computer parts.

There's an era coming when people will just throw up their hands and say "dunno!" Part of the problem is that the customer service department or whoever was responsible for Twitter probably had no real idea that there could have been a real problem with the website. In that case, people often start doing what they've done in the past at a more furious rate. What happens when the number of people who can actually understand the technology starts to dwindle? Someday we may not have people who write code directly in HTML anymore.

 

[anodos]

Someday we may not have people who write code directly in HTML anymore.

We are close to that already. My company hired website 'developer' to make a static webpage. It looked pretty, but the code made my eyes bleed.

 

[pirateghost]

We are close to that already. My company hired website 'developer' to make a static webpage. It looked pretty, but the code made my eyes bleed.

I have put my 12-yr old son to work on learning html, css, javascript, python, and he is about to embark on programming arduino. I will not let MY legacy allow these things to die. He has many other languages to learn....and I will push him to learn everything.

 

[jgreco]

We are close to that already. My company hired website 'developer' to make a static webpage. It looked pretty, but the code made my eyes bleed.

Sorry, I meant to say that we might have NO ONE who could write the code for a web page anymore.

I write bad HTML so I probably can't criticize too much on that front.

 

[AliceWonderMiscreations]

Honestly, I find this somewhat disconcerting. If if took that long to diagnose and fix a glaringly obvious problem, I wonder what other stuff they might be missing.

But I won't stop using them, but thanks to anthem, etal, my info is already stuck in the tubes, and I'm a sucker for good deals on computer parts.

I wish they would fix their TLS. Seems when I browse their site I am constantly switching between port 80 and 443 and I don't like that.

But I also won't stop shopping there.