Target couldn’t cope with demand and the website crashed

US Cyber Monday sales are on track to smash all records but they’re also causing headaches with websites crashing or, at best, slowing down. Adobe, which tracks 80% of transactions from the top 100 retailers in the US, said sales between midnight and 10:00 rose 14% to $490m and it expects them to reach $3bn by midnight tonight.

Online sales between Thursday and Sunday rose 17% to top $17bn, with spend per head up 4% to $135.25, Adobe said. While mobile accounted for 32% of actual online sales, it accounted for 53% of shopping visits.

If today’s estimates are accurate, they’ll top a five-day period that may have seen record online sales but also website outages as Target, PayPal, Neiman Marcus, Walmart, Victoria’s Secret and Footlocker all suffered some downtime.

Target has been offering at least 15% off virtually everything and despite having hit a record on Thanksgiving Day, demand stayed high today too. While that’s great news for the retailer, the outage issue is one it’ll need to address before next year’s Holiday shopping starts.

There were other problems too for many retailers. While Cyber Monday defied forecasters and retained its title as the top online shopping day, early discounts from many stores in recent days meant it also suffered high levels of out of stock messages meaning frustrated customers.

Adobe said out-of-stock messages were more than double their normal rate with 15 out of 100 product views showing products as unavailable.