Best Buy Co.’s website was shut down for about an hour Friday, one of the biggest shopping days of the year, leaving some customers unable to make purchases.
A surge in traffic from shoppers’ mobile devices caused issues that led the retailer to shut the site temporarily to restore full performance, Amy von Walter, a spokeswoman for the Richfield, Minnesota-based company, said in an e-mail.
Chief Executive Officer Hubert Joly has been working on reviving Best Buy’s sales amid steep competition from online and big-box rivals. For all retailers, mobile shopping has become increasingly important, with more than half of all online browsing on Thanksgiving Day this year -- 53 percent -- set to be done on mobile devices for the first time, according to International Business Machine Corp.’s Digital Analytics Benchmark.
The shares rose 1.7 percent to $39.41 at the close in New York after earlier dropping as much as 0.7 percent on news of the shutdown. Best Buy has slid 1.2 percent this year.
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