lululemon falls following website outages

Shares of lululemon (LULU) are down in early trading following outages of the company's website, which was back up and running on Tuesday. The website previously displayed an error message which said, "We are usually awesome at this. Please don't refresh your browser. You'll be back in the flow shortly." ERROR 404: Macquarie analyst Laurent Vasilescu said in a research note that he observed the e-commerce site was down Monday afternoon and estimated that every 24 hours the website was down represents 0.25% of total company quarterly sales and 0.33% of income from operations before general corporate expense. He added that the unexpected departure of Miguel Almeida, executive VP of digital, on April 25 may have contributed to the disruption of the company's e-commerce efforts. The company has reportedly, according to Geekwire, hired REI's CIO Julie Averill to join as CTO and the analyst said she "better get to work fast to fix the website." Vasilescu reiterated an Underperform rating on the shares and his price target of $40. PRICE ACTION: lululemon dropped 1.7% to $48.66 in morning trading.