Our referral program crashed the site during a holiday sale

We launched a new customer referral program last Black Friday, offering a $25 credit for each friend who made a purchase. The idea was solid, but our website host couldn't handle the traffic spike. The whole thing went down for about four hours right at 10 AM on the Friday. We had to scramble to post updates on social media while our tech guy tried to switch to a backup server. It was a mess, and we definitely lost sales. The worst part was the flood of angry messages from people who had just shared their link. We got the site back up, but the trust was already broken for a lot of folks. Has anyone else had a promo backfire because of a hosting issue, and how did you fix the customer relations part?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_mason13d agoTop Commenter

Chill, everyone's site crashes sometimes.

aaronallen13d agoMost Upvoted

My old host went down for 12 hours last Black Friday. That's not a crash, that's a business killer. Saying "it happens" just makes people think you don't take their money seriously. There's a big difference between a blip and a real failure.