Ganz gate V: More connection problems, and the buck stops somewhere else

After yesterday's attempt by Ganz to reassure its Webkinz customers that things are on the mend, it's pretty clear that normal day-to-day use of Webkinz World is still extremely limited for many people. My daughter's virtual room is still inaccessible, and her attempt to log on at about 7:15 pm EST was greeted with a "Sorry -- cannot connect" message. She tried again about 15 minutes later and was able to log on, but is currently limited to playing Webkinz Flash games.

However, a handful of commenters to my blog have reported a strange new problem: Webkinz.com doesn't display the normal logon screen and other links. This is what they see instead:

We can't even access the Webkinz site! If you type in www.webkinz.com, you get some generic page, just like the webkinz domain name has never even existed. I've even tried accessing the site through search engines, and several other methods but they all send me to this generic site with a picture of a girl in a backpack. Is anyone out there having a similar problem, or can you shed light on this? It's very bizarre!

One other person has confirmed this behavior. It seems to be a symptom of chronic server overload -- attempting to initiate too many connections to a Web server at once tends to result in error messages and other wacky behavior.

At least on the customer service front, Ganz is finally sending personal responses to customers. Unfortunately, the one report we have of a real response from Ganz was not only way overdue, but was completely bogus:

My daughters new webkinz (which is the pet of the month) cannot register. it says the "code has already been used" and they have yet to respond to my email. So my poor daughter is devistated that she is missing the daily prizes that the pet of the month gets. My son cannot get in his room. All the kinzcash and nothing to do with it. Again, webkinz doesn't repond. My daughters other webkinz had everything disappear from her room. All her hard work down the drain. Webkinz did respond 8 days later by saying some very wise words "someone has gotten your password and stolen your stuff". UM NO, no one had, as she still had her money and her clothes. Bizarre and beyond unprofessional. It took 5 days of me constantly trying to get my sons wekinz to register. As much as they charge for a stuffed animal I would think they would be more professional. It is totally frustrating and I am glad to see that we are not the only ones.

That's an interesting way to get angry customers off your back -- rather than seeing reported problem as a symptom of the larger technical issues engulfing the site, blame some unknown, mysterious baddie, give a virtual shrug, and hope that the customer will somehow accept this excuse and leave Ganz alone.

Another commenter, CraigU, brings up an interesting support-related question:

How does a company get away with not having a customer service phone number????

Well, Craig, My guess is that there's no way they'd be able to handle the flood of calls. Remember, there are millions of Webkinz customers and Ganz would be overwhelmed if just a few thousand of them called every day. According to this source, there are just 600 employees, many of them tied up in Ganz's other lines of business -- clothing, holiday and garden items, candles, and picture frames.

But I do know that at least one Ganz employee is aware of what's being said on this blog. This afternoon, my Web traffic logs showed a visitor from Ganz's mail server in Canada. He or she looked at some of the posts for less than three minutes, and then quickly left. There's not much of a reason for Ganz's corporate employees to linger here -- it should already be abundantly clear to them that Ganz has a public relations disaster on its hands.