In BBC NEWS | Business | Online gremlin scuppers M&S sale, the Beeb writes: Marks & Spencer suffered a blow to its "Christmas spectacular" on Thursday after a glitch on its website left customers unable to place orders.. Of the problem, M&S' response: M&S blamed "unprecedented traffic to the website because of the Christmas spectacular" for the problems with ordering on the website..

Also covered in the Guardian: Website crash ruins M&S flash sale: Marks & Spencer's flash one-day sale, offering 20% discounts, backfired yesterday when its website crashed, stopping thousands of shoppers from buying the cut-price goods.

Now, the thing is, this isn't 1996. It isn't even 1999 or 2000. Broadband is outpacing dialup in homes in the US, and I'm sure Internet take-up in the UK is not slouching off either. This isn't magic...I mean, there use to be magic involved, I used to have to walk around my office a certain way at ibm.com lest the site would crash, but generally there's no magic involved these days. You know what your customer set is, you know that a sale will bring in more customers, you know how your systems work (presumably you've tested these things all beforehand). I know the reality is that the web site team probably received a call Monday morning asking So, we plan to do a little promo, web site's running fine eh? with little or no time to prepare, nor any response to that memo from last August asking for more technology to be brought online before the Christmas sales begin.

Additional coverage: M&S site falls over: The struggling high street retailer had tried to drum up trade with a 20 per cent-off bonanza in its stores and on its website yesterday. But so many people responded online yesterday, the M&S site fell over for several hours during the middle of the day.