Well, this is unfortunate timing — it’s only the biggest shopping day of the year and the Best Buy website is down for some.
Katie Collins Principal Writer
Katie is a UK-based news reporter and features writer. Officially, she is CNET’s European correspondent, covering tech policy and Big Tech in the EU and UK. Unofficially, she serves as CNET’s Taylor Swift correspondent. You can also find her writing about tech for good, ethics and human rights, the climate crisis, robots, travel and digital culture. She was once described a “living synth” by London’s Evening Standard for having a microchip injected into her hand.
Black Friday is perhaps the most important day of the year for retailers worldwide — the massive discounts they offer bring in holiday shoppers looking to score deals. There couldn’t be a worse time for a company’s website to suffer an outage, and yet that’s exactly what happened to Best Buy on Friday morning.
Around 6.30 a.m. PT, Downdetector reports the website was down started to appear, before spiking dramatically with over 1,800 complaints just before 8 a.m. PT. (Downdetector is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.) A Downdetector heat map indicated that most of the reports originated on the East Coast of the US.
The number of reports seemed to drop immediately after the initial spike, but CNET editors still had mixed success for the following hour while trying to access the website. Some seem to find Best Buy deals are loading, but the website remains completely offline for others. By around 9 a.m. PT, reports were almost back at baseline level.
Best Buy didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about the outage.
If you’ve been unable to access the site this morning, there are plenty of other places to shop Black Friday deals in the meantime. Be sure to check out our pick of the deals at Walmart and Amazon.
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