Customers looking to buy their Christmas turkey online from Tesco PLC (LSE:TSCO) were left in limbo as the weight of traffic forced the site to crash.
Delivery Saver customers were told they could book a slot from 6am today, but some complained that the queue was opened before the advertised time.
Customers bombrded Twitter with messages complaining that the queue was already long by 5.59am ahead of the published opening time.
@Tesco clearly slots don’t open at the instructed 6am if this is the queue at 5.55am ????????♀️ what time should I have logged on, 5am?! Same thing happened last year! pic.twitter.com/dj491CjheE
— Anna Swift Russell (@annafantanna) November 15, 2022
Users were soon posting screenshots that showed the queue was up to 180,000 people while for others the site crashed as they moved through the queue.
I got up early to get into the @Tesco Christmas delivery queue. Joined it at 102,000, got down to 37,000 and the app refreshed and put me to the back of the queue, I’m now at 270,000. Not feeling the Christmas cheer right now!
— Phil Weston (@philwesto) November 15, 2022
A Tesco spokesperson said: “We’re currently seeing a high number of visits to our website and groceries app and some customers are temporarily having difficulty logging on or placing orders.”
“We’re really sorry about this. There are still slots available for both home delivery and click & collect over the Christmas period and we’re working to get things back up and running as quickly as we can. In the meantime, we recommend that customers use our website to place their order.”
Tesco is relatively late to open bookings for its Christmas delivery slots, with most other supermarkets having released them last month.