South Africa’s biggest online retailer has fallen over under the pressure of shoppers looking for Black Friday deals.

Both Takealot.com’s website and mobile app were down on Friday morning, with customers reporting glitches with the site in the early hours. Shortly after 7am, the website reported that it was “temporarily unavailable due to scheduled maintenance”.

The downtime is a big problem for Takealot, whose “Blue Dot Sale”, which began this morning, is the biggest shopping period for the online retailer.

In a post on Twitter at about 6.30am on Friday, Takealot said its website and apps were down due to “overwhelming volumes”.

“We’re working hard to resolve the issue and we hope to have the site operational as soon as possible. We apologise for any disappointment and we’ll have you back shopping ASAP.”

In a further tweet, sent at about 7.30am, Takealot said: “A fundamental service within our platform has failed, which has caused site-wide problems across Takealot.com. We seem to have found the problem and are busy working through a backlog of orders right now. Once we’re in a more stable state, we’ll be back online.”

Update

Takealot said shortly after 1pm on Friday that the website and apps are up again “but continue to experience ongoing issues”.

“Customers will unfortunately still struggle to access our site and apps as we are currently staggering traffic to the platform while we slowly build up to full site capacity, prioritising orders in process.

“We apologise for disappointing any customers and ask customers who are receiving the ‘Sorry, our store is full right now’ message, to please try again later. Customers can rest assured that thousands of Blue Dot Sale deals are still available and that the sale only closes at midnight on Tuesday, 28 November.

“Despite the intermittent site access issues, R4m worth of transactions were processed in the first hour of the sale, R10m by 2am and our entire 2015 Black Friday revenue value was exceeded by 6am. Samsung TVs were our initial bestseller, with 162 units sold in the first hour.” — (c) 2017 NewsCentral Media