Ebuyer kicked off its £1 clearance sale at 11am this morning and, as was surely inevitable, its infrastructure imploded almost immediately. The site at 1.30pm is still essentially inaccessible and for those that do manage to get anything into their baskets items are showing out-of-stock by the time they check-out or worse the process bails out mid-way through and their order becomes a quantum concern.

While the site’s down, they’re losing money through lost sales – if we take last year’s £260m turnover and assume people shop mostly in an 18 hour window my back-of-envelope maths suggests that they’re down £40k revenue per hour (so heading towards £100k for the day so far as I write).

The situation was foreseeable because it happens time and again with these sorts of promotions. Most recently, the Touchpad firesale was just another way of saying ‘rolling DDoS attacks’ as punters hammered sites the second a whiff of knock-down pricing was detected. Worse, once people find that they can’t get on the site they tweet about it causing others who may not even know who Ebuyer are to check out the car-crash live, adding to the problem.

In a world where resources can be virtualised and extra capacity spun-up on demand one might wonder why large retailers aren’t buying into the idea of cloud computing, CDNs and the like to buy themselves breathing space – even temporarily – around big promotional events.

In the case of Ebuyer, losing a couple hundred thousand in revenue as a result of self-inflicted ‘technical difficulties’ probably doesn’t come close to the effort and cost of rebuilding their infrastructure to cope with what are exceptionally rare traffic spikes. And in the end their image isn’t likely to be too-badly tarnished either – people have a short memory for this sort of thing and it seems unlikely that Staples, Dabs, Carphone Warehouse, Misco or anyone else caught in the torrent of traffic looking for Touchpads has suffered a loss of custom as a direct result.

Still, you’ve got to imagine that Ebuyer’s technical, sales and warehouse staff would probably be having a much better day had the promotion not been run quite so optimistically.