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At 2:30 a.m. yesterday, heavy holiday traffic began to overwhelm the infrastructure behind Yahoo's hosted stores, a Yahoo spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal. The first Monday after Thanksgiving — Cyber Monday — was expected to account for 12 percent of 2007's holiday-season online sales.

So it's a really bad timing for some of the 40,000 Web merchants who rely on Yahoo to run their online stores. Many Yahoo merchants could not complete customer orders and were forced to tell their customers to try back later. "I haven't been getting any orders today," one business owner told the Journal. "This is definitely an issue. Yahoo's usually been great. But not today."