Premium toy shop Hamleys suffered a bit of a .com malfunction when they forgot to renew their domain name earlier this month.

And it couldn’t have happened at a worst time, less than two months before Christmas, during which time toy stores make more money than in the rest of the year, thousands of shoppers could not access the website.

When online shoppers tried to visit the site they were faced with a holding page from the registrar. At such a busy time for Christmas shoppers, ToysRUs may well have got more website traffic that day.

The domain name hamleys.com was said to have expired on 28th October and was awaiting renewal or deletion. Many Twitterers were quick to notice the slip-up with one individual tweeting 'Not remembering to renew your domain name before Christmas - fail.'

Although domain registrars send reminders out to their account users – Domainmonster.com sends out 3 expiration reminders – someone clearly had forgot to renew the domain. Once a domain expires it goes into a status called redemption in which it can be renewed for an additional charge. It’s only once that extra period expires can someone else pick it up.

Hamleys CFO Alasdair Dunn said: 'The site was only down for an hour, or so, but we're back in business now. 'There was a glitch which caused the problem - but we have people across the country who say the site is working again now.'