Gap.com went down today, as did the websites of Victoria's Secret, Home Depot, and CompUSA. Williams-Sonoma, the kitchenware retailer, saw slowdowns on its ordering page. A tipster tells us he had problems with Borders and DiscoveryStore.com. A cottage industry of analysts — Gomez, Keynote, Pingdom, StorefrontBackTalk and others — have sprung up to track the outages.

E-commerce is no longer a novelty. Why don't the stores just work? The first thought is that cheapskate retailers have skimped on spending, but that's usually not the case, or the cause. Bandwidth and servers are cheaper than ever.

The problem usually comes down to the database that stores product information and orders, a key system which gets hammered when discounts prompt a surge of traffic. As online shopping grows and grows, planning for spurts of visitors becomes more art than science — and while the database is most frequently the problem, the fix is different every time.

It's hard to weep for Cyber Monday's frustrated shoppers. Not being able to spend money at your desk, with your employer paying you, strikes me as a particularly upper-middle-class problem to have. The good news for the offline shoppers who risk being trampled: Laptops are cheaper than ever, with stores like Walmart selling them for $499 or less. Cyber Monday will never go off without a glitch — but if a "server not available" message is the worst problem shoppers face, they should count their blessings.

(Photo by BohPhoto)

So it's a really bad timing for some of the 40,000 Web merchants who rely on Yahoo to run their online stores. Many Yahoo merchants could not complete customer orders and were forced to tell their customers to try back later. "I haven't been getting any orders today," one business owner told the Journal. "This is definitely an issue. Yahoo's usually been great. But not today."

Perweiler had this to say when asked about his online shopping plans: "I'm looking at some big-ticket items this year so I really want to know what other people — problems they're having with items, things of that nature." Ah yes. That's what the internet is good for. Unbiased reviews. But wait, Perweiler is hardly unbiased. Silicon Alley Insider noted that Perweiler is the marketing director of the National Retail Federation. Did Fox know who he was, or was it just a coincidence?

This isn't FBN's first flub since they launched. A couple of weeks ago, FBN erroneously reported that Apple was buying a large stake in AMD. Apple wasn't. An investment company in Abu Dhabi was. Whoops. Fair, balanced ... and sloppy? As long as Fox flubs in all directions, I suppose there's no reason to complain.

Now, the New York Times reports, almost 90 of the 120 online retailers belonging to online trade group Shop.org plan to offer discounts today on par with the type brick-and-mortar retailers offered last Friday. Shop.org survey results say that 32 percent of adults will shop online today.

One-third of the population is a large chunk and the crowd brings cash. One e-commerce analyst told the Times Cyber Monday will account for $4.68 billion in online retail spending, about 12 percent of what's spent online over the entire holiday season.

Some still don't buy into the idea of offering huge promotions to drive sales. "There's something inherently dishonest about it," Bill Bass of Fair Indigo told the Times. "If you're giving a promotion now, you're kind of saying you stuck it to people who bought from you when there wasn't a promotion." It's a fair point, but doesn't Bass know that's the way technology works?

(Photo by Tracy O)