Cyber Monday Traffic Takes Down Target, Slows Walmart

With estimates pegging that more than 120 million will shop, perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise some retailers’ sites went down due to high traffic volume.

But even Target couldn’t escape the Cyber Monday traffic plague.

Monday morning, some guests who tried to see what the Daily Deal was got this apologetic message:

Target’s site eventually came back up, but it’s hard to tell how long it was down.

But it remained spotty late Monday morning.

Leading into the holiday, Target was bullish about the holiday shopping weekend.

“We’re making Target.com a not-to-be-missed destination for deal-seekers on Cyber Monday and throughout Cyber Week,” Jason Goldberger, president of Target.com and Mobile, said in a statement. “We’re confident holiday shoppers who are looking to quickly and conveniently check items off their lists won’t want to miss Target’s deep discounts as well as free shipping and returns on Target.com.”

But, of course, Target wasn’t the only one. The first retailer to gain media attention for having problems was Neiman Marcus.

Neiman Marcus’ site wasn’t working on Friday or Saturday, according to reports, but it was back on Sunday. Because of the glitch, the company extended its Black Friday sales through Monday.

And customers took to Twitter pretty hard, like one who wrote: “Offering an extra discount but can’t access is frustrating.”

Reports indicate that Walmart’s site was up and running, but has glitches at checkout. Those “doorbuster” specials allowed consumers to get early deals, but customers reported that they couldn’t complete the order online. The site was reportedly running slow, too.

Walmart’s Cyber Monday sales actually kicked off Sunday to beat the rush, but that seemed to be the case for most major retailers.

While retailers were the main ones to suffer from outages, PayPal users also received an “internal server error” message when trying to log in to the site on Sunday, leading into the online retail holiday.