Currys Dixons PC World

formulaonefan

chucky wrote: »

if it was anything disastrous (as some people have suggested they were going bust) it would have to be reported to the stock exchange I imagine.

But a company like dixon (including pcworld, currys) not having a disaster recovery plan is surprising. Down for 8 hours maximum is acceptable but over that and not trading (three websites all together) is just not correct. It must networking related issue or some kind of single point failures. The holding page wasn't up when I tried 12.30pm. So it must be networking related or the management is trying to raise funds behind the scenes and put the website on hold until they sort out secret dealings. Don't know. Whatever it is...it doesn't look professional for a company like Dixons, Currys and PCWorld. All of them going out at the same time looks very wrong to me.

chucky

formulaonefan wrote: »

But a company like dixon (including pcworld, currys) not having a disaster recovery plan is surprising. Down for 8 hours maximum is acceptable but over that and not trading (three websites all together) is just not correct. It must networking related issue or some kind of single point failures. The holding page wasn't up when I tried 12.30pm. So it must be networking related or the management is trying to raise funds behind the scenes and put the website on hold until they sort out secret dealings. Don't know. Whatever it is...it doesn't look professional for a company like Dixons, Currys and PCWorld. All of them going out at the same time looks very wrong to me.

it's all that they need with their figures being released this week
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/245280/dixons-websites-take-a-day-off.html

housesitter

formulaonefan wrote: »

But a company like dixon (including pcworld, currys) not having a disaster recovery plan is surprising.

DR plans have to be tested. Different companies treat the idea seperately.

I worked for a financial house. We had the main network system, a backup, a DR testing one, a backup testing one, a software update one and a development one.
5 mirror copies of the entire system to unsure uptime.
However, we could measure downtime in seconds before it started costing the business vast sums.

Other places I've worked for, not in the financial sector, treat DR with a pole of differing lengths. It can be a costly exercise and some management doesn't see the returns, because hopefully there never will be.

Down for 8 hours maximum is acceptable but over that and not trading (three websites all together) is just not correct. It must networking related issue or some kind of single point failures.

The backend servers are probably common for all three of the sites.
It'll be some sort of problem with a database server and I'll wager they have huge databases.

Hopefully they haven't done like something daft like these guys did:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/02/1546214&from=rss

The holding page wasn't up when I tried 12.30pm.

I got no response at all from the dixons page tho the others were ok, then I got it coming up without images.
So, something is quite badly wrong, or people are hammering the servers. It's entirely possible that the machine serving up those maintenance pages are a simple desktop machine. It's workload isn't much for that page and you'd be working on the main web servers so wouldn't be able to keep it on line to do the job.
A lower power machine might be struggling becasue most of the UK keep hitting it to look for an update
I'm hypothosizing of course, but based on experience.

Whatever it is...it doesn't look professional for a company like Dixons, Currys and PCWorld. All of them going out at the same time looks very wrong to me.

Werd. :think:

adr0ck

guys there obviously just hacving issues with maintenace of their sites

probably because its been done in house by their own techguys

Conflict

All 3 are still down, but now the images seem to have gone AWOL as well.

mike_the_bike_2

"Yes it was a bad day" said the Ex Director of Information Technology at DSG

funkyfreddy9k

interesting that all 3 sites holding pages have been cobbled together using different applications. Currys using adobe golive, pcworld using frontpage - both of those looking similar, but dixons looking completely different and with no meta tag.


So they all apparently currently have different admins.

I wonder if they could be taking the first steps to split the companies?

mizzbiz

PC World Business seems to be going strong..
http://www.pcwb.co.uk/

amcluesent

IIRC, the Currys/Dixons/PCWorld sites all use a common ecommerce platform with some different branding. Suppose they could have had a total lost of the server-farm, and the DR hasn't worked either, not an uncommon outcome in IT.

Conflict

funkyfreddy9k wrote: »

interesting that all 3 sites holding pages have been cobbled together using different applications. Currys using adobe golive, pcworld using frontpage - both of those looking similar, but dixons looking completely different and with no meta tag.


So they all apparently currently have different admins.

I wonder if they could be taking the first steps to split the companies?

Well spotted but its probably the reverse that's happened - i.e. they are moving from each being run on separate systems to have just one system to run them all. Partially explains why the downtimes now been almost a day, only partially though as somethings really gone wrong with the process for it not to have been up within an hour never mind near enough a day.