In a letter released last night Moto CEO Dennis Woodside issued a formal apology to all the customers who weren’t able to properly place their orders, and promised to correct the problem. They’ll be improving MotoMaker’s ability to handle large numbers of customers, and they’ll be doubling the number of phones that will be available for the promotion.
On Wednesday, December 4th at 9am Pacific time the Moto X will once again be on sale for $350 unlocked for the 16GB model on any network with any color combination. Mark your calendars. Apparently this is shaping up to be a popular sale.
Full Motorola apology letter after the jump.
I want to apologize to our customers and fans for the issues we experienced on our website with our Cyber Monday promotion. I want you to understand what happened, and what we are doing to rectify the situation.
First, we misjudged the overwhelming consumer demand for Moto X, which was far greater than we expected.
Second, our pre-sale site testing was not sufficiently extensive. Testing failed to reveal weaknesses caused by large volumes of concurrent orders flowing through the MotoMaker customization engine.
Thus, when we opened the promotion this morning, an extraordinary spike in concurrent orders caused our website to go down. We couldn’t fulfill orders. The site became unstable. While some orders were filled, many customers tried all day to place their orders, unsuccessfully. Customers were left frustrated.
We have since found a solution that we believe addresses the concurrent order issue. Motorolans are hard at work right now, implementing that solution.
Here is what we are going to do: Starting at 12 pm EST/9 am PST this Wednesday, we will relaunch the $349 promotion. To help make up for this major inconvenience to shoppers, we will also add an additional promotional day on Monday, December 9. We will double the quantity of phones available, while supplies last, to allow as many people as possible to take advantage of the promotion. We’re also extending the 30% off offer on accessories to these two days.
Please note that
MotoMaker.com will open up for regular business tomorrow (Tuesday, December 3). We will stay the course on our regular sales as we restore our promotional prices for Wednesday and Monday.
Stay tuned to our
Twitter,
G+ and
Facebook pages for more updates. We understand people want frequent communications from us so we will do a better job at keeping you informed.
On behalf of all Motorolans, I apologize for what occurred today. I appreciate your understanding as we get this fixed in time for Wednesday and Monday.
Posted by Dennis Woodside, CEO
I guess you can have too much of a good thing. For Moto, this meant too many customers trying to take advantage of yesterday’s Moto X promo. People flocked to score a Moto X for $350 unlocked, and unfortunately Moto Maker just couldn’t handle the strain.