Currys PC World website crumples into unscheduled maintenance as shoppers chase latest gaming machines

UK electronic retailer Currys PC World found its website in need of urgent maintenance this afternoon and pulled its online orifice offline. Things began to totter earlier this afternoon as customers keen to snap up deals and shovel cutting-edge PC gear into electronic shopping baskets noted issues (including a 500 error code …

[The Oncoming Scorn]

We couldn't begin to wonder where it might source such gear.

It's returns pile!

[Dwarf]

No, How ?

The Currys knowhow team are presumably on the job.

I expect someone is frantically turning it off and on again, looking through the pictures, copying off the interesting ones, re-formatting it and sticking it back to factory state and losing your data or trying to sell you a bigger, faster one.. or so I've heard..

For some reason, the Bates 9000 springs to mind

[Brenda McViking]

Pffft

Even Amazon, with their collosal elastic server resources propping their retail site up couldn't keep their pages from going down during the console frenzy, though restoration happened in minutes

Curry's is just predictably awful. They might be back up by 2022, the big question here is will anybody miss them in the meantime?

[Andy Non]

Re: Pffft

I'm not a fan of Curry's far from it. But they did score a point over Amazon for me earlier this year. My PS4 controller had gone on the blink, so I ordered a new one from Amazon. It was faulty straight out of the box with the right joystick control frequently sticking or activating itself. It was supplied directly by Amazon, not one of their marketplace vendors. I got the strong impression the controller was counterfeit. I ordered one from Curry's and that one is working fine and appears to be robust and definitely not a counterfeit. Maybe it was the luck of the draw, but I'm a bit wary now of Amazon products, even ones they stock themselves.

[Chris Evans]

Maintenance! Calling it maintenance makes them look inept.

Why do companies insist on saying their sites are down for maintenance, when clearly they've crashed!

'Emergency maintenance' would be better but why not call a spade a spade say 'Technical problems'

Customers prefer honesty.

[Spoonsinger]

Re: Customers prefer honesty.

They really don't.

"Madam, you are too ignorant and ugly to use this product", has never got a sale.

"This sir will make you more productive and attractive", has.

[IGotOut]

Re: Maintenance! Calling it maintenance makes them look inept.

How about

"Due to the amount of brain dead morons who are to fucking dumb to wait a day or two extra, our site has crashed by them constantly pressing refresh whilst complaining on twitter that their entire world is ending"

[Colonel Mad]

Re: Maintenance! Calling it maintenance makes them look inept.

too

[Kane]

Re: Maintenance! Calling it maintenance makes them look inept.

Savage

[Dabooka]

Re: Maintenance! Calling it maintenance makes them look inept.

Do you understand how this works?

Waiting a day or two would result in no console. Hitting the F5 key at least gives these 'brain dead morons' a chance of getting their paws on one. It may matter not to you, but clearly for many people it does.

Plus all of these scalpers using bots will not have helped matters much either.

[Whitter]

"Those lucky enought to have made it..."

Or perhaps not.

https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.currys.co.uk

I wasted a month dealing with them in late summer: first they sent the wrong laptop; there's no email to 'customer services', and the 'live chat' they promote everywhere doesn't work; so its a phone line with 1hr waits. Got the wrong device returned and proper one scheduled. But they never bothered to sent the actual order. Rinse an repeat with customer services. Still no laptop. Rinse and repeat again, Finally I noticed on the website they no longer had the thing I wanted in stock and so this was all pointless, so cancelled. A month of hassle and nothing to show for it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I wasted a month dealing with them in late summer:

I'm really baffled that somebody, clearly intelligent enough to produce more than a tweet, decided to make a serious purchase on currys in the first place. Have they just landed here? Do they still believe their taxes are used wisely, etc, etc. Mind boggles...

[Captain Scarlet]

Re: I wasted a month dealing with them in late summer:

I would say the same thing, however for my current Samsung tablet it was £20 than other eletronics retailers including Amazon.

[Anonymous Coward]

In the meantime, the site has popped back up again

for me, as of Wed. morning, it's blank. Blank as in all ad-blocking plugins working 100% blank. I haven't even seen it as blank on google search page, where I left the search box open. Well done, currys, you've finally reached the state of perfection.

[Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse]

Hear me out... ok?

I bought a new OLED TV from them earlier in the year and I thought something was amiss. The guy who I spoke to in store seemed very knowledgeable, didn't try to sell me a £50 HDMI lead or upsell any extended warranty, and then helped me move the quite large box into the boot of my car. They are far from perfect yes, but sometimes they do get it right; and I do still quite like the option of being able to physically see and touch expensive purchases rather than rely on pictures.

In terms of their website, I'm sure I've heard of "elastic" capacity solutions in what some people refer to as the "cloud", maybe someone in there "know-how" team might care to have a look.

[You aint sin me, roit]

No console for you

They just marked it as out of stock.

Saved me 450 quid on a Chrissie prezz ...

[Hanry28]

Emergency maintenance or technical problems? According to currys pcworld reviews https://currys-pcworld.pissedconsumer.com/review.html their website just couldn't survive from the amount of users at the same time.