• Both FNB and Game offered customers incredible discounts on PlayStation 5 consoles for Black Friday.
• However, once the clock ticked over on Black Friday both Game and FNB experienced technical issues on their website and app respectively.
• The retailer and bank have offered up rather weak apologies as South Africans question whether the deals were real.

UPDATE 10:26 24/11/2023

Following publication of this story a Game spokesperson gave Hypertext the following statement.

“We experienced a brief disruption on the Game website in the early hours of this morning. Our Tech team responded quickly to stabilise the site which is running smoothly. We apologise unreservedly to our customers who were affected. We have been asked and confirm that we did honour the first 10 PS5 orders that were processed.”

The original story follows below:

South African gamers hoping to pick up a PlayStation 5 at a hugely discounted rate in the wee hours of Black Friday were left disappointed when FNB and Game left them staring at error pages.

For background, FNB was offering up 185 PlayStation 5’s with two games for the incredibly low price of R185 per month for 36 months for a total of R6 660 through FNB Connect. Game had also discounted the console to R6 499 but this offer was limited to 10 shoppers who needed to make use of a special code found on the retailer’s social media channels.

However, once the clock struck midnight, shoppers on both platforms were left wanting.

We tried to access the FNB website on Thursday evening and it quickly became evident that the website and app were quivering under the weight of tens of thousands of South Africans hungry for a deal. Once the clock rolled over to Friday morning, the website and FNB App became inaccessible for around 15 minutes. Once the app came back to life the FNB Connect store was inaccessible.

Over on X, South Africans expressed their anger and disappointment at FNB’s inability to keep its website running on Black Friday.

As regards Game, shoppers were met with excessive load times on the website and many weren’t able to check out and complete their purchase of a discounted console.

Both entities have offered incredibly weak apologies to shoppers who were hoping to get a deal.

“We’re sorry, the website crashed due to the high traffic on the one item,” Game responded to users expressing their disappointment in Game’s failure to keep its website functional.

FNB’s apology is even worse.

As you may imagine, shoppers are upset and many believe that nobody was able to take advantage of these deals given the fact that both storefronts were acting up.

It is incredibly odd that both Game and FNB experienced issues but especially so for FNB which one would think had systems in place to deal with a sudden influx of users.

Sadly, the PlayStation 5 deals appear to have been snatched up but Black Friday is far from over and other retailers appear to be holding up, so far.