Motorola's Site Crashed During Its Cyber Monday Sale, So It'll Hold The Promotion Wednesday Instead

The company tried to offer its new flagship Moto X phone for $350 unlocked, which is an incredible deal. Most top-tier phones cost about $300 more than that unlocked. But Motorola's site, which lets you customize the Moto X with a variety of colors, crashed under all the demand.

In a company blog post, Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside apologized for the downtime. He said the Cyber Monday special will be back Wednesday instead. The company will also have the same offer next Monday.

Here's the full apology from Woodside:

I want to apologize to our customers and fans for the issues we experienced on our website with our Cyber Monday promotion.

I want you to understand what happened, and what we are doing to rectify the situation.

First, we misjudged the overwhelming consumer demand for Moto X, which was far greater than we expected. Second, our pre-sale site testing was not sufficiently extensive. Testing failed to reveal weaknesses caused by large volumes of concurrent orders flowing through the MotoMaker customization engine. Thus, when we opened the promotion this morning, an extraordinary spike in concurrent orders caused our website to go down.

We couldn't fulfill orders. The site became unstable. While some orders were filled, many customers tried all day to place their orders, unsuccessfully. Customers were left frustrated.We have since found a solution that we believe addresses the concurrent order issue.

Motorolans are hard at work right now, implementing that solution.Here is what we are going to do: Starting at 12 pm EST/9 am PST this Wednesday, we will relaunch the $349 promotion. To help make up for this major inconvenience to shoppers, we will also add an additional promotional day on Monday, December 9. We will double the quantity of phones available, while supplies last, to allow as many people as possible to take advantage of the promotion.

We're also extending the 30% off offer on accessories to these two days. Please note that MotoMaker.com will open up for regular business tomorrow (Tuesday, December 3). We will stay the course on our regular sales as we restore our promotional prices for Wednesday and Monday.

Stay tuned to our Twitter, G+ and Facebook pages for more updates. We understand people want frequent communications from us so we will do a better job at keeping you informed. On behalf of all Motorolans, I apologize for what occurred today. I appreciate your understanding as we get this fixed in time for Wednesday and Monday.