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Black Friday: Lowe's website goes down, Macy's card processors fail

By Ed Adamczyk
Shoppers walk through the main level of Macy's department store on New York's Herald Square on Friday. Sales were delayed by failures in Macy's card processing equipment, and the website of home supply retailer Lowe's was temporarily down on Friday morning. Photo by John Angelillo/UPI
1 of 3 | Shoppers walk through the main level of Macy's department store on New York's Herald Square on Friday. Sales were delayed by failures in Macy's card processing equipment, and the website of home supply retailer Lowe's was temporarily down on Friday morning. Photo by John Angelillo/UPI | License Photo

Nov. 24 (UPI) -- The website for home supply retailer Lowe's had a temporary outage and credit card processors stopped working at Macy's stores on Black Friday.

On the day after Thanksgiving Day, one of the busiest shopping days of the year for online and in-store purchases, customers of the two retailing companies experienced delays and offered complaints.

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A Twitter user wrote of an attempt to purchase items online from Lowe's on Friday morning, saying their "cart was full and now the website is down!"

Users of the Lowe's website were told in an on-screen message that "The site is currently offline." But the site was back in business by 11 a.m.

At Macy's, which has over 700 locations across North America, many customers stood in line with credit cards and gifts cards in hand until they learned at checkout counters that card processors were not functioning. Several Bloomingdale's stores, owned by Macy's, had similar problems, TechCrunch reported on Friday.

"It is taking longer than usual to process some credit and gift cards in our stores, but we have added additional associates to the floor and are working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible," a Macy's statement said.

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Macy's had a website outage during last year's Black Friday, which had a negative impact on its quarterly earnings.

Terry Lundgren, who was Macy's CEO at the time, explained the pressure in the retailing industry on Black Friday in a Fortune magazine interview.

"If you're not open and your competitors are, there's going to be a number of customers who simply will go shop elsewhere," he said. "You'll never recover that sale."

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