Update: Checkout this post by Rich Riley, SVP Yahoo! regarding the outage…and then read the strongly worded comments.

As everyone and their grandmother reported, Yahoo! Merchant Solutions experienced outages on Cyber Monday, potentially losing its merchants boatloads of $$$$.

The official response from Yahoo!:

We are aware that Merchant Solutions was experiencing some problems today [Monday] due to heavy holiday traffic on Yahoo! powered merchant stores. We are aware of the issues and are working towards a solution as quickly as possible. Yahoo! makes every effort to prevent outages. We continue to put strategies in place that will minimize the impact that extremely heavy traffic periods have on our merchants. Yahoo!’s relationship with our merchants is extremely important to us and we value their loyalty. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and we are continuing to put processes in place to prevent further disruptions.

Yahoo! Merchant Solutions (formerly known at Yahoo! Stores) is probably the largest ecommerce provider with somewhere between 40k - 50k storefronts. While Cyber Monday is not the busiest shopping day of the year, it’s close. This is obviously completely inexcusable.

Sure, there are a ton of other solutions - Homestead (ProStores), osCommerce, Infopia, Cart32, etc. - but while merchants will groan and complain, the thing is that changing ecommerce providers can be a pain in the ass. Assuming that Yahoo! takes care of its merchants the rest of the holiday shopping season, I’m not sure there will be much of an exodus to other ecommerce providers.