THE Argos website has been taking up to 10 seconds to load and is unavailable 20% of the time, as shoppers rush to grab online bargains on Black Friday.
Debenhams and Tesco also suffered delays, with their websites taking up to eight seconds to load.
The latest data on how the major shopping websites are coping with Black Friday suggests Argos has struggled to handle demand since early this morning.
Pages were taking almost three seconds to load before 8am, but this delay increased steadily during the morning.
In the hour to 11am, pages were taking an average of 9.7 seconds to appear, though this improved to 2.4 seconds in the hour to midday but by 1pm it flew up to four seconds.
The entire site remained unavailable at least 20% of the time.
Other high streets retailers are not experiencing similar problems, however.
Websites which have shown consistently good performance so far include Amazon, John Lewis and Boots, all of which have been available online for 100% of Black Friday.
Both Debenhams and Tesco have also improved on their earlier difficulties.
Between 12pm and 1pm, Debenhams’ speed was down to 0.8 seconds and Tesco’s stood at 0.9 seconds.
A spokesman for Tesco told the Press Association its site was “fully operational and we are happy with the number of orders received so far”.
He added: “There has been a good level of customer satisfaction.”
The figures have been compiled by IT analysts Capacitas.
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