Glitch, high traffic knock Postal Service tools offline

A computer glitch and a huge amount of traffic combined to knock various U.S. Postal Service Web-based services offline this week.

The problems started Monday morning, according to Michael Woods, a spokesman for the Postal Service . He noted that several different online tools, including the Postal Service's popular Click-N-Ship service, were suffering outages. Some of the services were taken offline to let technicians work on the problem.

Woods said the service's IT workers weren't yet sure what caused the service problems but said that all of the services except for Click-N-Ship were back functioning properly by this morning. The Click-N-Ship servicestill having intermittent problems - error messages and long delays -- by Thursday afternoon, according to Woods. The service lets users print postage and shipping labels online,

"There's a glitch somewhere in the system and this is our busiest time of the year," said Woods. "We're still trying to pinpoint the cause. We think we're very close to finding a solution... We understand customers are frustrated. We're frustrated. We're working 24 hours to find a solution."

The U.S. Postal Service hasn't been the only one hit with holiday site glitches.

Web sites falter as holiday season opens

Several major retailers, including Sears , Bloomingdale's and Saks Fifth Avenue , were hit with Web site breakdowns just at the start of the 2008 major holiday shopping season. Sears.com was largely unavailable on the biggest, most notorious shopping day of the year - the day after Thanksgiving.

Woods pointed out that the Postal Service was quick to take down web services as soon as they were aware of the problems. "We're not going to make our customers guinea pigs," he added. They also sent out email alerts to some 50,000 frequent users and telephoned the top 25 users.

Last year, 34 million online users printed out labels from the Postal Service's Click-N-Ship site.

Woods noted that if a label isn't printed because of an error on the page, the user's credit card won't be charged.

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