On any other day, a major website failure for one of the world's biggest online travel brands such as Expedia would've made quite a few headlines.
Last Friday (March 11), as large parts of the world were glued to the internet or television sets as events in Japan unfolded in real-time, Expedia and sister site Hotels.com were having some pretty serious performance issues.
Local versions for almost every Expedia site except the US, but including the UK, Australia, Canada and Germany were down for around 90 mins to two hours, as well as some Hotels.com properties.
At the time, some officials within Expedia were saying privately that traffic spikes may have been the cause of the problem, but it soon became clear that the outages were part of a wider issue.
It turns out that an update to the system did not exactly go according to plan and customers were not able to access homepages.
No other details have been given for the outage, although it is not believed to have been caused by the events which took place off the coast of Japan.
An official says:
"The support teams have worked to fix this issue and we are confident that this has been resolved."
Given the tragic circumstances around the earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Japan which were taking place at exactly the same time, website issues for a large corporate tend to pale into insignificance.