Specialized.com website down

As a multichannel retail business, the one thing you hope never to happen is your website going down. This morning, someone at Morgan Hills HQ is faced with exactly this situation – Specialized.com is currently down.

For major global brands a Service Level Agreement (SLA) relating to website up time, is typically in place. “Common SLAs (Service Level Agreement) promise 98% uptime (7.31 days of downtime per year) up to 99.99% (52.60 minutes of downtime a year). Typically, the closer an SLA gets to 100% (high availability), the higher the cost of the service to the customer.”

For global businesses this can quickly be equated to a figure for lost revenue. In 2013 the Amazon website went down for 40 minutes, resulting in a report $5 million in lost sales ($66,240 per minute)!

For Specialized, with a reported US$78.4m in online sales during 2022, the outage comes at a time where the brand is working hard to ease the overstock burden it (and the majority of the industry) faces.

When asked for comment, Specialized UK stated, “This is a planned outage as we make some upgrades. It’ll be down for approximately 3 hours.”