The crowds may have been thinner in bricks and mortar stores in the U.S. for Black Friday sales, but online sales were booming, causing the website of Best Buy to crash twice on Friday.

The first crash happened early Friday morning, but the portal came back online still in the morning. The second crash occurred 5:30 p.m. on Friday, but the site was working again by Friday evening.

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Explaining the first outage, Best Buy spokeswoman Amy von Walter said is a statement issued on midday of Friday, "A concentrated spike in mobile traffic triggered issues that led us to show down Bestbuy.com in order to take proactive measures to restore full performance."

Even as early as Thursday morning, some media sites that tried to access Best Buy's e-commerce site observed difficulty due to record-high levels of website traffic.

Channel Advisor, which monitors same-store sales for over 2,700 online retailers said that as early as Thursday night, Best Buy's online sales jumped 16.32 percent compared to the same period in 2013.

Analysts forecast is that Black Friday online sales would generate $2.48 billion which it later downgraded to $2.4 billion. The lower figure is partly due to web traffic which makes consumers only compare prices online and then go to the real store to buy the items they saw on the website.

About 140 million people in the U.S. are expected to shop in stores or online this weekend, but some experts have observed that because of early discounts by a lot of retailer, Black Friday has just become another shopping day for Americans.

"Black Friday has turned into Black November," The New York Times quotes Richard Jaffe, a retail expert at investment bank Stifel, who observed subdued shopping in North Virginia. He added, "I'm not sure if there's anything such as Black Friday anymore. The erosion on Black Friday into Thursday has messed a lot of people up."

TagsBest Buy, Black Friday, website crash, retailer