Trying to access Costco Canada’s website results in the message, “we need just a moment…” and “there are lots of shoppers on our site right now.”
“Thank you for your patience. We will automatically take you back to the page you were on as soon as possible. Please understand that while your place in line will be held, product availability cannot be guaranteed,” says the message.
But in reality, the website will not take you into the site as we’ve been trying for the past couple of hours. We’re super low on toilet paper at the moment.
“If you refresh this page or use the back button you will lose your place in line,” says Costco Canada.
Costco shoppers who were trying to place orders online Tuesday found that the website wasn't working. The issues started and it was unclear what was causing them.
Shoppers were tweeting about the problem and reporting the issues to the website Down Detector. There were hundreds of reports on the site after just a few minutes of the issues with Costco.
Users were tweeting at Costco in the hopes of getting their orders places or the website fixed Tuesday.
Newsweek Newsletter sign-up >
Related Stories
Ranked: The Best Hallmark Christmas Movies
Thanksgiving and Christmas Turkeys: Bad Holiday Movies
Instagram Added New Shopping Features to The App
Others were checking with the store on Twitter to see if the site was actually not working for all shoppers.
Users were also sharing screenshots of the errors and "Access denied" messages they were getting when they tried to access the site.
This is a developing story and will be updated as more information becomes available.
Other companies, including apparel retailer H&M, also saw outages and slowdowns.
Shoppers walk past a placard that states "Black Friday preview" at a Macy's store as pre-Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday shopping accelerates at the King of Prussia Mall in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, November 22, 2019.
Shoppers walk past a placard that states “Black Friday preview” at a Macy’s store as pre-Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday shopping accelerates at the King of Prussia Mall in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, November 22, 2019.
Mark Makela | Reuters
As online shopping becomes more popular over the Thanksgiving weekend, some retailers experienced outages amid the surge in traffic.
Costco’s website went down entirely for a brief period of time early on Thanksgiving Day. Costco.com was experiencing “intermittent slow load and transaction times” starting late Wednesday, according to website performance monitor Catchpoint.
By Friday morning, Costco had a banner on its website that said “all Thanksgiving Day-only promotions have been extended into Friday, November 29th, WHILE SUPPLIES LAST.”
Apparel retailer H&M’s website was also down for a short period, less than 5 minutes, on Thanksgiving morning, Catchpoint said. The site later had intermittent outages again on Friday morning.
Nordstrom Rack customers reported some technical issues on social media on Black Friday.
Tweet
The website monitor Catchpoint also said Home Depot’s website had “slow load times” during the middle of the day on Thanksgiving.
Representatives from these companies didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.
The stakes are high this weekend, leading into Cyber Monday. Even though Monday is traditionally the day that companies tout their steepest discounts online, more and more of that promotional activity has been seeping earlier into the holiday calendar.
Online retail sales on Thursday are expected to have surpassed $4 billion, according to Adobe Analytics, which monitors the online transactions of 80 of the top 100 web retailers in the U.S.
How US economy is reliant on the consumer
And the pressure is really intensified this holiday season, with six fewer days between Thanksgiving and Christmas compared with 2018, making for the shortest holiday shopping calendar possible.
In years past, around Black Friday, companies including Macy’s, Target and Best Buy have all experienced web issues. ChannelAdvisor, a software platform for retailers, had estimated that retailers lose about 4% of a day’s sales, each hour that a website is down.