Just as it appeared that Takealot had resolved the issues that caused the site and app to go bust early this morning, with each working smoothly again as of 10.30am, twenty minutes later the app would no longer load specials and the site was down for the second time this morning. What started out as a mistep is quickly turning into an epic failure.

There was not a hole deep enough to hide in last week that would spare you from hearing about Black Friday, with Takealot in particular heavily promoting its Blue Dot Sale, across the web, social media and TV. Takealot encouraged users to wait up till 12.01 AM this morning to snag a good deal, with many consumers doing just that. Unfortunately, the opening hours of the big sale proved to be a major bust.

Both the site and the app – which had some special discounted items ahead of time - early this morning were working just past midnight, albeit with long loading times in our experience.

That did not last long, with both promptly crashing before 15 minutes had passed. They were not the only one, with at least one other online etailer, Superbalist, also experiencing problems.

In the interim Takealot certainly earned more than its fair share of irritation on Twitter, especially since the etailer encountered the same issues last year. Reactions ranged from the serious - with users uncertain whether their order had been received after payment had already been made - to the humourous, wondering whether Takealot had confused Black Friday with April Fools.

Both the site and app were briefly up and running again, only to once again fall into a dark hole. Considering that earlier it took 10 hours for Takealot to recover, it does beg the question what is happening with Takealot’s IT infrastructure, and why the local etail giant couldn’t scale to meet the surge in demand? Prior to 10:30 AM, accessing the dedicated app to load daily deals only produced an error message, while the website produced a no more encouraging ‘Sorry we’re full right now, please come back in a few minutes’ message.

Not all local etailers had such a bumpy  start. While Loot’s site takes long to load, its app is functional, artsavingsclub.co.za, which also promoted its Black Friday sale heavily on social media, appears to be coping with the demand.