Target site overwhelmed by Cyber Monday traffic

Target.com offered 15 percent off nearly everything on Monday, bringing a flood of traffic that was twice as high as its previous busiest day, the Minneapolis-based company said in a statement. “If you wouldn’t mind holding, we’ll refresh automatically and get things going ASAP (sic)”, the message read.

Many people expressed frustration on social media for the company not being prepared for high traffic.

Through the morning, Cyber Monday online sales rose 14% year over year.

Target’s site fared better on Thanksgiving, when it registered a record number of visitors, and Chief Executive Brian Cornell said the site experienced no issues on Thursday. Along with the full site being down, reports also surfaced of shoppers having problems adding specific items to their cart.

“As we experience spikes in traffic, our systems place guests in a queue and prompt them to access the site later”, Target spokeswoman Jenna Reckshe told CNBC.

Monday is expected to be the biggest online shopping day ever, with estimates that it will rack up over $3 billion in sales. Retail Dive reports that Walmart and Neiman Marcus also faced similar problems with their websites on Black Friday.

Retail analysts have been paying close attention to holiday purchasing patterns as more spending shifts online and away from traditional stores. Target shares were down 1.5 percent in morning trading.

IBM has predicted that Cyber Monday online sales would grow by more than 18 percent compared with 2014.

In the first 10 hours of the day, online orders totaled an estimated $490 million, according to Adobe.