Best Buy Online Site Crashes on Black Friday

The website for Best Buy suffered an outage on Black Friday during one of the year’s busiest days of shopping. The website was down for in the early morning hours before coming back online and then crashing again on Friday night.

The company said the first outage was due to heavy traffic. A spokesperson said a concentrated increase in the amount of mobile traffic triggered a series of issues that led to the site shutting down.

The site crashed again on Friday evening, as users took to social media complaining of the outage at 5:30 p.m. ET. At 6:00 p.m. ET both the mobile and desktop sites were still off line.

Later Friday evening a company statement said the company had experienced record levels of traffic to its website and that affected the performance of the site. The spokesperson in turn said that is what caused the site to temporarily show down.

The site experienced issues at 9 a.m. Thanksgiving morning and it had been down late Wednesday night as well.

Shoppers who expressed their displeasure went to the electronics retailer’s’ page on Facebook to express their unhappiness and concern.

Best Buy has not released a statement as of early Saturday morning across any of its social media sites.

The company shares increased over 2.5% prior to reports circulating about the outage on Friday. The stock closed on Friday up 1.7%.

Best Buy did not break out sales or traffic data for Thanksgiving or Black Friday. However, one technology tracker said sales of same stores at Best Buy were up 16.3% online Thursday compared to one year ago.

An industry analyst said the website’s outage was a testament to the amount of traffic Best Buy was receiving. He thought the impact on Best Buy would be minimal to their bottom line, as the majority of people visit the site to compare the prices and then shop at the brick and mortar stores.

Earlier in November, Adobe made a prediction that Black Friday would be the fastest growing sales day online of 2014. It was projected initially to take in over $2.48 billion, which represents a growth of 30%.

However, the projected was updated on Friday to an estimation of $2.4 billion in sales.