Retailers hoping for record Black Friday sales

John Lewis's website has crashed as it was overwhelmed with shoppers looking for an online deal on Black Friday.

John Lewis apologised to customers in a statement to ITV News.

Currys PC World has reportedly clocked up online sales of 30 TVs a minute during this year's Black Friday sales event.

The electrical retailer said it had had its "biggest ever start to Black Friday with seven million visitors to the site this week already".

Stuart Ramage, E-Commerce Director at Currys PC World, said:"We’ve seen unprecedented demand online with a 53% increase in hourly web traffic and across the country we’ve seen customers queuing from before the stores open – everyone’s in good spirits and things are running smoothly.”

Websites are reportedly feeling the pressure as this year's Black Friday shopping event has seen a surge in online shopping rather than instore purchasing.

While shops were quieter than expected websites for stores saw increased numbers of people logging on and slowing down their web page loading times.

Argos appeared to be one of the brands experiencing the biggest delays on its website with pages taking almost four seconds to load during the hour to 1pm and the entire site remaining unavailable at least 20% of the time.

This year's much anticipated Black Friday shopping event has been "much more sedate" than expected.

Although some shops opened as early as 5am in preparation for an influx of shoppers hoping to bag a bargain many shop floors remained quiet early on and orderly queues were formed outside busier shops.

ITV News Consumer Editor Chris Choi reports:

Shops across the UK have experienced a quieter start than predicted as today's Black Friday event began in a more sedate way than last year's pre-Christmas shopping event.

Retailers are still hoping that customers could spend their way to the UK's first £1 billion in online shopping by the end of the day but so far instore shopping has not seen the buying rush expected.

Shoppers have been queuing outside Tesco stores in the hope of grabbing some Black Friday bargains.

Initial indications were that customers were remaining orderly, with little sign of the chaos seen last year.

In some places there were more security guards than people queuing, with staff telling shoppers there was no need for a "massive rush".

A number of major stores opened at midnight, with others keeping bargain hunters waiting until at least 5am.