Website crashes shatter corporate images

According to a study published today, site downtime can have a serious knock-on effect on the image of other parts of a company's busines, such as shops or catalogues.

Robin Duke-Woolley, author of the report and senior consultant at research house Schema, said downtime affects businesses across all sectors - not just e-tailers. He said: "Website crashes can hit a dot-com company or a traditional high street business equally badly because of the increased competition on the internet. Those customers turned away will go elsewhere and won't be coming back in a hurry."

Bruno d'Avanzo, CEO of Hostmark, which commissioned the survey, said the speed of communication, often regarded as the internet's main advantage, can also be its biggest enemy.

"The word of mouth effect is a company's biggest downfall because any sort of bad news spreads like wildfire," d'Avanzo said.

Other costs incurred from site crashes are direct revenue loss, compensation pay-outs, a drop in share price and employer downtime. The study reported that in the UK alone, the cost of website crashes last year amounted to £128m - a figure which is set to double during 2001. The UK figure was similar to projected losses for other major European countries France, Germany and Sweden.

The reasons for the majority of website downtime included failures with network connections, hardware and software and overloading and power outages.