Home improvement retailer Lowe’s went on Facebook and invited all of its friends to a totally awesome pre-Black Friday party late Thursday night and early Friday morning. Like all really fun parties, too many people showed up and things got out of hand. Which is to say that the doorbuster item, a KitchenAid stand mixer at 90%, sold out quickly, and took the store’s entire site down with it.

Lisa explains the situation from a deal-seeker’s point of view:

How’s this for idiotic. Lowes has a Facebook page with something like 200,000 fans. They are doing Black Friday preview sales, and tonight offered up a KitchenAid stand mixer (retails for around $190) for NINETY PERCENT OFF – but ONLY to the first 100 people who completed checkout. The code was posted; and a vast majority of people couldn’t even get TO the checkout page, the site kept crashing and wouldn’t load. A few people (myself included) even had their browser crash, and their computer slow way down.

Deanna wrote:

[The party] was more of a B**chfest than anything 🙂

Waited up and extra hour to have one coupon code in 30 minutes and their site crashing after about 2 minutes.

Oh well, nothing is free and I just lost a hour of my time.

Lowe’s, for its part, posted an apology on their Facebook page shortly after the party:

Fans, we hear your frustrations and would like to make it up to you. We were looking forward to this promotion, too. The rush to the site simply knocked it offline. We will post here Friday how we can carry out this Black Friday promotion in another way.

Did any of the dedicated deal-seekers out there in Consumeristland finish the transaction before the site went down?

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