Brief: Rush For T.M.X. Elmo Briefly Shuts Walmart.comBrief: Rush For T.M.X. Elmo Briefly Shuts Walmart.com

Elmo won this round, but Wal-Mart will get the last laugh this holiday season.

Walmart.com suffered a brief outage last week when shoppers flocked to the site for the hard-to-find T.M.X. Elmo, a doll that busts into fits of laughter. "Incredibly high traffic" caused the outage, the company says, adding that the doll sold out in a matter of minutes. Wal-Mart says it has corrected the problem.

It's been an uneven holiday season online for Wal-Mart, which redesigned its Web site this year. It blamed a 10-hour outage the Friday after Thanksgiving on traffic hitting seven times last year's level when it had tested for only double that load. But the site's doing well, ranking as the No. 4 shopping site behind Amazon.com, Dell, and Yahoo, comScore says, and as the third-fastest-growing site.

The companies that operate the five fastest-growing nontravel sites--Best Buy, Ticketmaster, Wal-Mart, Circuit City, and Victoria's Secret--all have multichannel strategies, not Web-only. In that lies the bad news for those competing with Wal-Mart. It's big problem online this holiday season seems to be dealing with the traffic--not attracting it.