My phone buzzed at 2:14 in the morning. I did not recognize the number, and I almost let it ring out, until I remembered that a friend had passed my contact to a store owner earlier that day, telling her to call me directly if things got worse overnight. It clearly had.
Her voice was shaking, the voice of someone who does not normally call a stranger past midnight. I could tell right away this was not a small problem.
"Orders have stopped coming in," she said. "I do not know what is happening. I thought maybe it was just a slow night, but it has been hours."
She told me she had noticed the order count on her dashboard looked unusually quiet earlier that evening, but she brushed it off, thinking people were simply not shopping that night. It was only when she got curious and tried to open the products page herself that she realized something was badly broken. The page spun. And spun. She waited. Almost five minutes later, it finally loaded.
Five minutes. On a products page. For a store that normally loaded in under two seconds.
