Shopping rewards website Quidco crumbled under the Black Friday volume of traffic last week, with its sites remaining offline for the majority of the morning.
Quidco works by directing customers to the best deals on items they wish to buy through cashback and then takes a cut of the money spent from the retailers. Although it's normally a very lucrative platform, with the average customer saving around £280 a year, its performance on Friday shows it probably needs to up it infrastructure
"We’re aware of site access issues affecting some members. Thanks for your patience while we resolve the issue. Promotions will be extended," the company said at 9.05am when it was clear the company's customers weren't going to be able to make money back on their purchases.
Quidco revealed the issues were down to its servers, although didn't give too much information to customers until the problems were rectified into the afternoon.
Despite the affiliate website's fortunes being less than favourable, its social media team managed to stay positive, demonstrating the importance of staying on the side of customers and making sure they don't lose trust, just because your servers can't cope.
The company's team wrote on Twitter account: "Thanks for all the support in the last 26 hrs. We recognise that we've royally screwed up & we're working on big plans to make it up to you."
This theme continued into Saturday too, showing although its punters weren't able to collect points or money off their orders on Black Friday, they could make light of the situation, tweeting a day after the incident: "I had this really bad dream last night that the UK's biggest cashback site went down on the most popular shopping day of the year..."
Quidco has now extended its Black Friday deals to Whopper Weekend, offering 50% more cashback on its 50 leading retailers.
