As someone who has been responsible for ‘getting up’ large commercial sites that have gone down (and usually bringing them down in the first place), I have to feel for the guy who is responsible for JCrew.com. Its one of the most tense firedrills in the IT world.

In 2008, there isn’t much excuse for a major retailer’s website going down on CyberMonday. Especially when that retailer just announced a 29% drop in Q3 sales last week.

Egads.
That’s a VERY expensive downtime.

The only way to escape shame for this is if it were some sort of high-end attack.

No one is going to give you a pass on heavy traffic – that’s job #1.

BTW, when you make your ‘we’re down’ page a static HTML, then people can’t reload to check if its back up