Dive Brief:

• Best Buy’s website faltered during one of retail’s crucial shopping periods, on Black Friday and again later on Saturday.

• Plenty of frustrated customers vented on social media regarding the inability to complete purchases online, and the retailer responded by saying that its mobile capability might work better.

• The retailer attributed the outage to heavy traffic, though many customers complained on social media that the company wasn't equipped to handle its orders.

Dive Insight:

With Cyber Monday here, the retailer is no doubt scrambling to maximize its online capacity. Amazon is never down, no matter how busy, as Wedbush Securities retail analyst Michael Pachter notes, and the Best Buy outages serve as a “testament” to the capabilities of Amazon.

But the incidents are also a testament, he says, to how heavy Best Buy's traffic was this season, most likely due to its great Black Friday deals. Pachter shrugged off the mortifying incidents, saying he didn’t think they would end up affecting Best Buy’s Black Friday-related bottom line much at all.

"This shows how hard it is to manage a website when it's busy, but props to Best Buy for being busy," Pachter wrote CNBC in an email. "Their Black Friday deals are quite competitive."