An overflow of consumers wanting Motorola's Moto X smartphone on Cyber Monday for $150 shut down the company's website as people were trying to buy.
"We're currently restoring online services. Some may have site-access, but Cyber Monday deal prices won't begin until all systems are a go," Motorola reported on its Twitter account.
Services appeared to be back to normal an hour and a half later, but the sites were not fully put into operation until all the sites were accessible.
"We're currently restoring online services. Some may have site-access, but Cyber Monday deal prices won't begin until all systems are a go."
According to InformationWeek, a select few people could download Moto Maker, create their own Moto X device, and go through check out.
Others however were not able to complete payment for the smartphone, and finalize their order. I want to apologize to our customers and fans for the issues we experienced on our website with our Cyber Monday promotion. I want you to understand what happened, and what we are doing to rectify the situation.
"First, we misjudged the overwhelming consumer demand for Moto X, which was far greater than we expected. Second, our pre-sale site testing was not sufficiently extensive," Motorola chief executive officer Dennis Woodside said in a statement on the company's official blog in response to the difficulty consumers experienced. "Testing failed to reveal weaknesses caused by large volumes of concurrent orders flowing through the MotoMaker customization engine. Thus, when we opened the promotion this morning, an extraordinary spike in concurrent orders caused our website to go down. We couldn't fulfill orders. The site became unstable. While some orders were filled, many customers tried all day to place their orders, unsuccessfully. Customers were left frustrated. We have since found a solution that we believe addresses the concurrent order issue. Motorolans are hard at work right now, implementing that solution."
The Moto X measures 4.7-inches, has a 1,280-by-720 display with 316 pixels per inch, has a round back with Motorola's X8 mobile computing system consisting of computing chips, a 1.7 gigahertz Qualcomm snapdragon S4 Pro, a natural language processor, and contextual computing processor that controls the devices sensors PC Magazine reported.
