Target’s website buckled under the pressure of holiday shoppers on Monday morning, crashing just as the company tried lure in business with a slew of Cyber Monday deals.
The site first went down around 7 a.m. Pacific, according to Reuters. As of 10:30 a.m., things still had not returned to normal.
After receiving an “Access Denied” message when visitors tried to pull up the site this morning, now many are able to browse the deals — they just can’t buy anything. GeekWire hasn’t been unable to add any items, including a box of cereal, to the shopping cart, though it’s unclear if the outage if affecting all customers.
Target did not immediately responded to questions about the outage, but the company told Reuters earlier this morning it was metering traffic because order volumes had surpassed even what the company saw on Black Friday.
The wave of traffic came as Target offered a 15 percent discount across the entire site, in addition to other “doorbuster” deals.
This is just the latest Cyber Monday-induced headache for online retailers, as Seattle-based Avalara, which manages online sales tax for retailers, and PayPal’s order processing platform also went down under unusually heavy workloads over the past couple days.
The spectacle of Black Friday is slowly moving more and more toward online, which is great news for businesses — but poses unique challenges to IT departments.
Amazon, the king of e-commerce, is leading the charge this year by rolling out fresh deals throughout the day. Last Cyber Monday, the company said customers orders about 500 items every second.
Analysts predicted sales would top $3 billion for the first time ever today. As of 7 a.m., sales were already at $490 million, according to a report from Adobe Systems.
