NEW YORK (AP) — Adobe Analytics says that online spending hit new records on Thanksgiving Day, reaching $4.2 billion. That’s a 14.5% increase from a year ago.
Adobe also says that Black Friday is on track to hit $7.4 billion as of 9 a.m. Friday; $600 million has already been spent online on Friday, representing a 19.2% increase from the year-ago period.
But as online sales surged, some retailers were grappling with outages, according to technology company Catchpoint, which monitors retailers’ online performance. Costco.com experienced “intermittent slow load and transaction times” starting late evening on Wednesday, according to Catchpoint. The site was unavailable for a brief time early on Thanksgiving.
Costco was flagging “longer than normal response time” on its website late Friday morning. H&M was down for under 5 minutes on Thanksgiving, according to Catchpoint. The site went down again Friday morning, though it’s back up. And HomeDepot.com experienced intermittent “slow load times” on Thanksgiving, according to Catchpoint.