IBM did not respond to requests for comment on the outage. American Eagle did not dispute StorefrontBacktalk.com's basic account of what happened, though a spokeswoman said a few details about the incident were incorrect.
According to Evan Schuman from StorefrontBacktalk.com, which monitors retail Web sites, the outage began with series of server failures.
Schuman, who said he spoke with an unnamed IT source at American Eagle, said a storage drive failed at an IBM off-site hosting facility. That failure was followed by a secondary backup disk drive failure. Once the drives were replaced, the company attempted a restore of about 400GB of data from backup, but the Oracle backup utility failed, possibly as a result of data corruption. Finally, American Eagle Outfitters attempted to restore its data from its disaster recovery site, only to discover the site wasn't ready and could not get the logs up and running.
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