Eager shoppers to Halfords.com were met with a holding page on the website yesterday after the company forgot to renew its domain name.

The website was down for part of the day on Thursday after what the forgetful retailer called a “temporary administrative issue”.

Halfords tweeted that there was a problem with the site, saying: “There’s been an administrative issue with our website. The issue has now been resolved and the site should be accessible again shortly.”

Halfords then said later: “There was a temporary administrative issue in our domain name renewal process yesterday. This resulted in some customers being diverted to a holding page.

“The process is now complete and the site is accessible again.

“We apologise to those customers affected for any inconvenience.”