Downtime of the week: Dell Order Tracking

Time for a new PC. Selecting one was easy (I like the Dell XPS series), ordering as well. But the order tracking resulted in a full blown crash on the Dell website. Needless to say, that looks embarrassing and should not happen on a major e-commerce website. Please see the screenshot below. Meanwhile the order tracking works again. Well, Dell is not an AlertFox customer, but I think they should be.

On a side note: I am surprised they have debugging enabled on a production server. Usually, one of the things you want to avoid when deploying an ASP.NET application into production is to leave the <compilation debug=”true”/> switch on within the application’s web.config file.