Cape Town - Shoppers and techies across South Africa were pulling out their hair on Friday morning as popular shopping websites melted under the pressure of their own popularity on Black Friday.
Bargain-hunters logging on at 7am couldn’t load pages at all. Instead, they received error pages with messages including “Temporary glitch, come back later”, “Oops” and “Awkward”.
More dedicated shoppers had been up early, filling their baskets as they sipped on their first coffee, only to see the sites crash and their baskets cleared out when they got to the paygate.
Many blamed those latecomers arriving en masse and melting the system.
ANA’s internet shopping expert said all the error message basically mean the same thing: “Sorry we can’t serve you this morning because we can’t scale as we had hoped.”
A quick look at www.amazon.co.uk, the popular British shopping site, suggested that things were still peachy there.
Amazon.com, the American site, looked steady too, but it was still early in the US.
AFRICAN NEWS AGENCY