If you were trying to pre-order a Sony PlayStation 5 today through Smyths Toys, odds are that you ran into some difficulty.

The toy store chain announced yesterday afternoon that a new allocation of pre-orders for the PS5 would be made available today lunchtime. According to a tweet sent from Smyths Toys' social media account, the pre-orders were limited to online only, either through home delivery or click-and-collect.

However, it appears that Smyths Toys' website was overloaded with orders, as many people who were attempting to pre-order were met with either a site timeout error or their orders took so long that their sales basket were empty by the time they reached the checkout stage.

It's not yet clear how many were made available to Smyths Toys, and whether it was evenly split between the digital edition and the disk edition. A number of tweets found that people were able to order and place the PS5 into their basket, but couldn't make it through to the final part of the checkout.

One potential customer from Wicklow said that he was in the queue since 11AM this morning, was asked to confirm his e-mail for the receipt, and when he tried to go through checkout, he was told that the console was sold out.

Jim Egan had a similar story. "I managed to get to the payment section, confirmation page twice, I already had an account so it was just to verify the security numbers and confirm, each time the server crashed and back to the start when the refresh button finally worked," he told us.

These issues, of course, aren't just limited to Smyths Toys. In the US, customers attempting to pre-order through games retailer GameStop got in touch to say they too had similar issues with site loading issues. Likewise, in the UK, customers have had similar issues with Smyths Toys in the UK and with other retailers.

We've reached out to Smyths Toys and to Sony for comments, and we'll update this article if and when we hear back from them.