Black Friday has proven too much for some online retailers, with overwhelming demand causing websites to crash.
Online shoppers hoping to bypass anarchy on the high street during the shopping event, which originated in America, have experienced just as many problems attempting to grab discounted tellies or half-price electric toothbrushes from retailer's sites.
Currys, GAME, Argos and Very are all down thanks to Black Friday sales madness. This is the digital equivalent of beating down the door.Kotaku UK (@Kotaku_UK) November 28, 2014
Curry's greeted online shoppers with a seemingly endless queue before they could even browse items, causing many to take to Twitter and complain at its ill-preparedness.
Pahaha aha ... 45 min wait to access Currys website ... This is only half an hour in to #BlackFriday ... #ipredictariotKaty Heffernan Smith (@katyheff9) November 28, 2014
Wait for Currys/PC World website just went up from 27 mins to 45. Don't think I'll bother then :)Andy Clough (@AndrewClough) November 28, 2014
Some savvy customers found a way to jump the queue by disabling their javascript and finding they could bypass the page.
If you want to bypass the queue at Currys disable Javascript in your browser... (Google it, it's really easy :)Pentangle IT (@PentangleIT) November 28, 2014
At the time of writing, Game had yet to recover from the influx of traffic, and Argos was forced to tweet out to frustrated consumers, apologising for the problems they were experiencing and asking people to "bear with us."
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 (@Argos_Online) November 28, 2014
Experian's figures for Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2013 revealed that UK shoppers spent 15.3 million hours shopping online on 2 December 2013. That figure is set to be eclipsed in 2014, however, with research suggesting that shoppers will spend around 1.32 billion this weekend.
