Eurotunnel online woe hits holiday season

France for £1 - great, if only it worked...

Angry web users have complained today about downtime on the Eurotunnel website coinciding with the launch of a special promotional offer from the Telegraph newspaper. Telegraph readers were offered the chance to buy day-trip tickets to France for just £1. However, it appears massive demand for the bargain rail fares may have brought down the Eurotunnel website. Similar demand on the phone lines meant the company was largely uncontactable for much of the day. One silicon.com reader, who branded the downtime a "fiasco", said a member of Eurotunnel's call centre staff had told him "calls were backing up and the servers couldn't cope". The site, http://www.eurotunnel.com/dt , which went down before lunchtime Monday was back up by 15:30(BST), though it was still proving sluggish at best - returning the standard "Cannot find server" error message each time we tried to enter the password provided by the Telegraph. An updated message on the Eurotunnel telephone booking line warns customers they may experience problems as a result of the popularity of the offer. silicon.com was unable to get through to anybody at Eurotunnel to ascertain the likely length of the disruption - which is affecting anybody hoping to book with Eurotunnel and not just those hoping to take up the special offer. At the time of publishing the Telegraph had not returned our calls.