Tesco has said its website is back up and running after it crashed under the weight of more than 290,000 people queuing for a Christmas delivery slot on Tuesday morning.
Customers logging on to secure one of the prized December 12 to 24 slots complained of a queue of more than 100,000 by 6am.
At one point, shoppers reported they were in a queue numbering more than 290,00.
Delivery Saver customers – those who pay a fee for priority access – were told they could book a slot from 6am on November 15, but some complained the queue was opened before the advertised time.
Posting on Twitter, one customer said: “I logged on at 5.59 (am) to get ready only to find over 135,000 in the queue already.”
By 6.13am, users were posting screenshots that showed the queue was up to 180,000 people.
The app crashed and shot me back a few thousand places 😭 this level of drama is not ok for 6am #tesco #delivery pic.twitter.com/1HlzWA5YjO
— Shannon ⚓️ (@Queen_Shannon) November 15, 2022
Others complained they had spent time waiting in the queue only to be kicked out.
One customer, named Shannon, was around 183,000th in the queue before the app crashed and she was pushed back to 205,063th place.
Writing on Twitter she said: “This level of drama is not ok for 6am”.
Another user said: “Hey @Tesco just sat for half an hour in your xmas queue and as soon as I reached the front of the queue I got kicked out and now the wait is an hour.”
What a joy! Woke up at 6am, discovered I was already number 267,567 in the @Tesco Christmas delivery slot queue, waited 1.5 hours to be let into a site that glitched continually. Possibly paid five times. Surely they could do better than this? pic.twitter.com/RAKjYRbVsr
— Victoria Scott (@Toryscott) November 15, 2022
Twitter user Victoria Scott wrote: “What a joy! Woke up at 6am, discovered I was already number 267,567 in the @Tesco Christmas delivery slot queue, waited 1.5 hours to be let into a site that glitched continually.”
“I was 38,000 in the queue and the app ‘refreshed’ itself and now I’m number 178,000. You’re having a laugh,” said another.
Some customers likened Tuesday’s mammoth queue to the online scramble to secure Glastonbury tickets earlier this month, or the queues faced last week by those trying to book tickets to Peter Kay’s first live tour in 12 years.
A Tesco spokesman said the website struggled under the sheer number of people logging on on Tuesday morning, rather than any technological problem.
While delivery slots were still available in the days before Christmas, they were disappearing fast, and he urged customers to consider ‘click and collect’ as an option for managing festive shopping.
The supermarket said it would be releasing more slots at 6am on November 22, when they will be available to all customers, not just those who subscribe to Tesco’s Delivery Saver scheme.
A spokesperson said: “Online Christmas slots are now available for Delivery Saver customers on our website and Groceries app after some customers temporarily had difficulty logging on or placing orders this morning.
“We’re really sorry about that and it has now been resolved with slots available for both Home Delivery and Click+Collect over the Christmas period.”
Tesco is relatively late to open bookings for its Christmas delivery slots, with most other supermarkets having released them last month.
This year, the supermarket has more than 1.2 million slots available in the week leading up to Christmas.
Shoppers had been expected to seek out the slots in greater numbers than usual this year, as they set tighter budgets and seek to spread the cost of Christmas in an effort to cope with cost-of-living pressures.
