Argos, Tesco, Currys & Boots buckle under weight of Black Friday demand
Online retailers including Argos, Tesco, Currys and Boots have buckled under the weight of demand from expectant Black Friday shoppers with all suffering outages and enforced queuing
Savvy consumers planning to dodge fistfights and scrums in bricks and mortar stores were left twiddling their thumbs instead as a host of the UK’s most popular web retailers struggled to cope.
Amongst them were Tesco, no stranger to saying sorry in recent months, which was forced to apologise for making customers wait 30 seconds before they could access its Tesco Direct portal due to ‘lots of people shopping’. It was a similar story at Currys where the site asked browsers to hang up their mouse for a ridiculous hour or more in a never-ending queue.
Elsewhere catalogue retailer Argos presented shoppers with a red traffic light signal instead of an Aladdin’s cave of bargains, citing a ‘very high volume in visitors’ for the failure.
The technical glitches drew criticism on social media, with many being forced to complain on Twitter concerned that their payments weren’t getting through and vent frustrations at a lck of updates and information.
In a tweeted response Argos said: “We know some of you are experiencing problems getting on to our site this #BlackFriday. Please bear with us, we hope to be with you soon.”
@Argos_Online its ridiculous i was at the checkout and it shut down, what's that all about. very frustrating spending my morning waiting
— Crafty Crockery (@craftycrockery) November 28, 2014
Been trying to get on to tesco direct site since midnight. Still showing same 30 sec countdown. This is appalling. — DemonUK (@D3monUK) November 28, 2014Big well done to @Tesco whose Black Friday deals mean Tesco Direct hasn't worked since midnight. #planningfail
— John Ward (@wardmajor) November 28, 2014