Late last week flat pack furniture giant IKEA was hit with a series of technical issues that left its website in a sorry state and made it tough for visitors to carry out safe shopping online.

While the site was not completely taken out of action, a number of its key features were only working sporadically, or stopped operating altogether.

This meant that customers could not check to see whether particular products were in stock, proceed to the checkout to complete a transaction or look for updates on existing orders.

At the moment the retailer has not confirmed the precise nature of the problems its website is encountering, but the fact that it lasted for several days suggests that they may have been particularly significant.

A spokesperson said that intermittent interruption of safe shopping online from IKEA’s UK website was being dealt with by a large technical team.

In the interim, many customers made use of social media to get in touch with the firm, receive updates on stock levels and make complaints.

IKEA also suggested that it would be sensible for anyone who was in urgent need of a particular product to visit their nearest bricks and mortar outlet, rather than trying to buy it online.

It is unusual for a retailer of this size to suffer from website issues that last longer than 24 hours, so IKEA’s unexpected outages may prove to be an important lesson for other firms about the need to ensure IT resources are as resilient and reliable as possible.

Part of the problem in this case may have been brought about by IKEA’s recent migration to a new IT system, which combines in-house hosting with cloud computing. Such major shifts often have teething troubles, although not always on this scale.