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Click Frenzy website crashes before massive online sale begins

Click Frenzy website crashes before massive online sale begins

Major Australian retailers hoping to slash their prices for a one-day online super sale have suffered a major setback after the Click Frenzy website failed to launch properly.

Organisers previously expected a million shoppers to log on, with sale items including electronics, books, toys and fashion.

The sale had been trending on Twitter for hours in anticipation of the "sale that stops the nation", but the website fell victim to being too popular.

The www.clickfrenzy.com.au had been unavailable since its anticipated launch time of 7pm AEDT, following a similar fate of Myer, Priceline and David Jones, which all previously suffered website crashes.

The Australian Retailers Association has hopes the sale will be a boom for local retailers, whether they're bricks and mortar, or whether they are online.

This is the first year of the sale, but already more than 150 retailers have signed up, some offering discounts of up to 90 per cent.

Within minutes of the launch time, Twitter was awash with plenty of criticism from users disappointed in the service:

"It's the sale that was suppose to stops a nation... so far it stopped just its servers #clickfrenzy" said @BohdanD.

@indian_one later tweeted "#clickfrenzy "Would you like a server fail with that?".

Jacob Arnott also added: "Just wasted 20 minutes trying to get onto #ClickFrenzy. What a flop!"

Click Frenzy co-founder Grant Arnott has since apoligised to consumers who are missing out on the heavily-discounted deals.

"Firstly, I would like to issue an apology to anyone who has been inconvenienced and frustrated by the technical issues relating to the inaugural Click Frenzy 24 hour online sale," he said.

"The technical directors, developers and infrastructure specialists involved in this inaugural event are working to get to the root of what occurred with the wave of traffic at 7pm.

"I am not in a position to describe exactly what has occurred yet as the teams involved are working on the solution first to resolve any problems.

We will provide answers as soon as they are available."

Late on Tuesday night the official website was still failing to cope with demand although the Facebook page was directing customers directly to deals.