Social media influencer Holly Smith prompts more than 80 million attempts to visit Halifax firm’s website

A video posted by social media influencer Holly Smith prompted more than 80 million attempts to visit the website of Halifax business Cut Price Barry’s.
Barry's Cash & Carry website Cut Price Barry's crashed after social media influencer did unboxing video of food ordered from the site. Abrar Khaliq, right, with customer Glenda Bairstow.Barry's Cash & Carry website Cut Price Barry's crashed after social media influencer did unboxing video of food ordered from the site. Abrar Khaliq, right, with customer Glenda Bairstow.
Barry's Cash & Carry website Cut Price Barry's crashed after social media influencer did unboxing video of food ordered from the site. Abrar Khaliq, right, with customer Glenda Bairstow.

Last Wednesday, Holly, from HollyVlogs, posted a video on Facebook and YouTube having secretly ordered from the business, which is based in King Cross.

Over the next 20 minutes there were over 80 million attempts to get on their website.

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Holly has almost 46,000 followers on Instagram, 482,800 Tik Tok followers and almost 100,000 YouTube followers and has written a book on how to save money.

Cut Price Barry’s is a retailer who specialise in near date and out of date food items.

Abrar Khaliq, from the business, said: “During lockdown we have naturally been busier than ever trying to help people save money and have probably delivered to every part of the UK.

“We knew something was wrong when we started getting thousands of messages asking us why our site was down. That was when we saw Holly’s video showing her money saving experiment.

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“We spoke to our web developers Digital Renovators who said the site had been taken down as the international server company thought we were being targeted by a team of global hackers!

“It turns out Holly’s fans and their friends had tried to visit the site eighty million times in under 20 minutes. Gobsmacked would be an understatement.

“The website was down for around 18 hours and has had its resources beefed up in case of any more spikes and people from all around the country can now grab the bargains again.”

Lee Kenny, from Digital Renovators, who provide the website and support for Cut Price Barry’s, said: “We hear a lot about the power of influencers in marketing, but in almost 15 years of doing this I’ve never seen such a spike before.

“It turns out in this case that rather than an influencer being paid, Holly decided to go undercover and that authenticity probably added to the attractiveness of the savings.”

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