Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Nordstrom and Oprah Take Groupon Down

Groupon has been slow or completely down for the last two hours. The leading daily deal site is today featuring Nordstrom Rack in many of its markets (spend $25 and get a coupon worth $50). It’s a somewhat ironic situation given Groupon is known for physically overwhelming retailers with its armies of deal buyers.

To compound matters, Groupon is also set to be featured on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” today, though I’m not sure the show has actually aired in any markets yet. Oprah picked Groupon as one of her “Ultimate Favorite Things” for 2010, and as part of the announcement the company will be offering a nationwide deal of a $25 Kiva credit for $15.

Groupon acknowledged the slowness in a Tweet: “Hang in there, everyone: big things are afoot at Groupon.com today and we apologize for the site being so slow. We’re on it. Updates soon…” Tweeters replied that it was more than slowness that they were seeing; the site has actually been mostly down for some time now.

Kara Swisher reported this morning that Google is eyeing Groupon and would potentially offer more than $3 billion for it.

A nationwide deal with Gap in August had also compromised Chicago-based Groupon’s servers.

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Nobody was excited about paying top dollar for a movie about WikiLeaks. A film about the origins of Pets.com would have done better.

— Gitesh Pandya of BoxOfficeGuru.com comments on the dreadful opening weekend box office numbers for “The Fifth Estate.”