Monday, January 07, 2008
Blockbuster Online Offline
Blockbuster's website has been down for more than 13 hours and counting on Monday into the late evening. This is a significant failure for a leading media company that is increasingly web dependent. The outage from a "system problem" that hasn't been made public.The website crash couldn't have occurred at a worse time. With everyone at CES talking about web-to-TV content and sharing movie services, Blockbuster is making as much noise as a Charlie Chaplin movie.
Blockbuster is in trouble financially as NetFlix has pressured the company to lower prices which sharply cut revenue, but now BB is raising prices for its online rental program.
The company was also taken to task for working with Facebook to automatically share information about movie rentals with the list of friends.
Could this be a harbinger of worse things to come at Blockbuster?
Update 1/8/08, 6 am PST. Blockbuster is back online as of this morning. No explanation as to why it took so long to return the site to service, and at first blush there does not seem to have been a major redesign or obvious new features. The company is giving an investor meeting tomorrow, making this a bad time to frustrate customers.
Posted By John Gartner at 11:23 PM
Permanent Link: Blockbuster Online Offline
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