Newegg deal brings Google Offers to its knees

Google Offers may have bitten off more than it can chew with its Cyber Monday deal from Newegg.com, a site popular with techies for computing equipment and other electronics.

The deal, $20 for $40 worth of Newegg credit (it’s now expired), sent a horde of eager bargain hunters to Google Offers, but the site was clearly unprepared for the onslaught of traffic.

While trying to purchase the deal, I received multiple error messages from Google Offers, mainly around being unable to retrieve my account information. The site gave me further errors when I was finally able to purchase the deal, and it took longer than usual to process the purchase. Plenty of others I’ve talked to experienced similar issues, and a quick search on Twitter revealed others having trouble with Google Offers.

It’s understandable that Google Offers would experience a bit of a slowdown given such an enticing deal, but it’s not exactly heartening to see the site falling apart before your eyes. It took me around 10 minutes to finally purchase the deal, and others I’ve chatted with were unable to complete their purchase before the deal reached its maximum number of buyers.

If Google can’t manage handling an offer for a popular online retailer, I can’t imagine that it’d be able to handle something like last year’s infamous Groupon Gap deal ($25 for $50 worth of credit).

Update: A Google representative issued the following statement to VentureBeat about the trouble: “We are aware of this issue and are looking into it.”