I got the official email from Borders today about pre-ordering my copy of the next Harry Potter book. Unfortunately their online ordering system for the book has been down all day. They obviously weren’t expecting such a huge response and probably sent out the same email to all 500 million folks who signed up to be notified. Crazy madness I tell you!

Maybe they need to reduce the work on the web boxes and put it into a cluster or space on the backend. Then at least we could see the website instead of a timeout. They definitely need a fail forward (i.e. fail fast) approach to their websites.

[tags] harry potter, borders, distributed computing, fail forward, fail fast[/tags]