The UK's largest specialist wine retailer of wine, Majestic Wine has seen a surge of online orders as it announced the temporary closure of its shops until Tuesday in order to give its staff respite and enable it to restock.
The group's website crashed on Saturday afternoon and is still offline following this unprecedented demand.
Majestic Wine's CEO John Colley posted a message on Sunday:
'To allow our hard working staff some respite, we have taken the decision to close all Majestic stores on Sunday, and open only to click & collect orders on Monday. This is following a week of unprecedented demand across the country.
Everyone at Majestic has been working around the clock to keep the UK’s wine racks supplied with amazing wines during this difficult time. However, demand has been unprecedented and all of our staff have been putting in a herculean effort to keep going.
It’s important to note our 200 wine warehouses across Britain will be back open as usual from 11am Tuesday. We are working incredibly hard to make sure that, despite a deeply challenging environment, we are ready to face whatever the coming weeks throw at us.
That means bringing in lots more stock from our fantastic suppliers around the globe, bringing in extra vans, hiring more staff and increasing our distribution capacity.
In the meantime we will continue to put the well-being of our people first and foremost, along with closely following the official guidelines, in order to keep everyone connected with Majestic safe.'
The company has since posted this message on its website:
'Our website is currently unavailable due to unprecedented demand. We are working hard to get it back to normal as soon as possible.
We are also currently experiencing exceptional demand across our stores and have therefore applied restrictions to usual trading in some locations. Rest assured, we do have large volumes of stock and extra resource arriving into our stores in the coming days.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused and hope to get back to normal as soon as possible.'