Burlington Coat Goes Dark for 36 Hours

Not many major retailers would take their online store offline for more than a day to conduct planned maintenance. That's what Burlington Coat Factory did this week, allowing its main web site to go dark for nearly 36 hours as the company performed a major software and hardware refresh, which included an upgrade to an Oracle app server, according to Storefront Backtalk (link via The Server Room) .

Although the outage was planned, the site displayed a message saying “The Burlington Coat Factory site is temporarily unavailable. Please check back later.”  Burlington Coat Factory web supervisor Jack Follansbee said the messaging on the site" could clearly have been better," but said the extended downtime was a necessity.

“We needed a full 24-hour outage to do the upgrade," Follansbee told SB. "Wednesday is actually the lowest revenue day for our Web site."