Target Website Has Problems Amid Heavy Traffic

Target Corp.'s website was suffering technical problems on Monday morning, making the site intermittently unavailable for some Web shoppers on the popular online shopping day known as "Cyber Monday."

"So sorry, but high traffic's causing delays," read a message on Target.com. "If you wouldn't mind holding, we'll refresh automatically & get things going ASAP."

A Target spokesman said the retailer was restricting access to the site to manage the heavy traffic.

"As a part of our Cyber Week promotion, today for the first time Target is offering 15 percent off virtually everything online. Both traffic and order volumes are exceeding Target's Thursday Black Friday event, which was our biggest day ever for online sales," said Target spokesman Eddie Baeb. "To help manage the volume, we have been metering traffic to the site. We have teams working diligently to restore Target.com to full functionality."

The temporary outage raises questions about the retailer's ability to handle a massive amount of visitors to its site. Earlier this year, Target.com was temporarily unable to handle a flood of traffic when it launched a limited time partnership with the designer Lilly Pulitzer.

Target's site fared better on Thanksgiving, when it registered a record number of visitors, and Chief Executive Brian Cornell said on Thursday the site experienced no issues.

Other retailers have struggled with the shift to online shopping. Neiman Marcus Group's website was unavailable for several hours on Friday. On Thanksgiving morning, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. struggled to process some orders on its website amid a flood with shoppers seeking door busters.

Write to Paul Ziobro at [e-mail]

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(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 30, 2015 11:35 ET (16:35 GMT)

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