Update 11 am ET: As of early Nov. 22, Walmart's website is fully operational and this story has been updated with a response from Walmart.
They say misery loves company and today Walmart joined the ranks of Amazon as the former's website crashed just seconds after its Black Friday sales went live.
Walmart had been teasing its Black Friday deals all week, and some of the best deals we had seen — such as this $99 Samsung Chromebook — were set to go live at 10pm ET tonight, but seconds after they went live, trouble reared its ugly head.
First Walmart's site began to slow down and seconds later various shoppers and Tom's Guide editors began receiving error pages when browsing through Walmart.
In a statement to Tom's Guide, a Walmart spokesperson said:
Due to extremely high demand for our Black Friday deals last night, our site experienced some delays shortly after our event began online. Many customers were still able to check out smoothly, and we were able to quickly fix the issue. We apologize to any customers impacted.
Website-failure tracking downdetector.com began receiving reports of Walmart being down at precisely 10 pm with many shoppers commenting that the site would not allow them to checkout with their purchase. Even Walmart's official Twitter feed was barraged with comments from angry shoppers who were stuck in e-commerce limbo as their shopping carts failed to proceed through checkout. We reached out to Walmart and will update our story when the retailer replies.
It's unclear how this outage will affect Walmart's bottom line, but in the meantime, that $25 Google Home Mini doorbuster is now live and in stock.
We want to hear from you. Have any readers experienced problems while shopping at Walmart?
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