Thousands of Yahoo stores could not make any sales during most of the day Monday, because their shopping carts were down. Yahoo said the servers buckled under the stress of high traffic. Yahoo hosts about 45,000 shops for small etailers.

Many of those shops have affiliate programs, so affiliates suffered a loss as well. Sure hope no one had any PPC campaigns going for any of these merchants. Some merchants said the only thing they could do to try to save the day was put a big phone number up telling customers the cart was broken and to order by phone.

Merchants started reporting transaction completion problems beginning at 6 am PST on Cyber Monday, one of the biggest online shopping days of the year. The problem was not fully resolved until 11 PM. Can you imagine? I’ve seen merchants report their weekend sales leading up to Cyber Monday were the highest ever, so they expected to really capitalize on Monday’s Holiday shopping frenzy. Such a shame and there is no way Yahoo can make up all the lost revenue to these merchants. Here are a few of the news headlines.

Yahoo’s Cyber Monday Meltdown – NY Times
Yahoo Can’t Cope with Cyber Monday – CNBC

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