Dive Brief:

• The United States Postal Service website Tuesday took something of a hit due to 'unprecedented' traffic, the agency said.

• Shoppers attempting to track their deliveries helped lead to traffic snafus that dragged down site loading times Tuesday morning.

• Although the USPS got a lot of grief on social media, the website slowed but never really failed, and there were no issues with data breaches.

Dive Insight:

Chalk up another online traffic jam thanks to this holiday’s major e-commerce growth. Despite efforts to bump up hiring this year, United Parcel Service and FedEx are reportedly struggling with the volume triggered by the uptick in e-commerce sales this season.

But in this case, the short-lived problem at the post office was more of an inconvenience to consumers interested in tracking where their packages were. Impatient social media users may have hashtagged their complaints to the world, but that didn’t make any difference to the speed of the actual packages.

Postmaster General Megan Brennan said in a statement Tuesday that on that day alone the postal service would handle some 30 million packages. Volume this year is up 15% over last year, and, in the end, USPS will deliver 15 billion packages and other items of mail this year.