By Barnaby "Bottom-Line" Coyne
For a few hours on Saturday, Coles' website carried a simple, slightly sheepish message: "we're currently offline — but not for long." It wasn't. The outage came and went twice before the retailer's systems steadied around 4pm AEST, according to The Guardian.
The trigger was mundane and familiar: a viral Reddit post. Once word spread that 24-packs of premixed alcoholic drinks were listed at nearly 80% off — savings of more than $100 on some cases, per the report — customers piled in. The website and app buckled under the traffic, went dark, briefly came back, then dropped again that afternoon.
The Guardian's report does not say how the discount came to be listed, whether it was a pricing error, or how many orders Coles ultimately honored at that price. Those are the questions that matter most to shoppers who managed to check out before the site crashed — and to a retailer now weighing the cost of making good on a viral bargain versus the reputational cost of clawing it back.
It's a small story with a familiar shape: a pricing glitch, a crowd of bargain hunters moving faster than a company's servers, and a business left to sort out afterward what it owes the customers who got there first. Retailers have eaten the cost of these moments before rather than face the backlash of cancelling orders. Whether Coles does the same here is, as of Saturday, still an open question.
Somebody's paying for this. Let's find out who.
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."