Over the weekend Marvel started their #1 campaign to tie-in with SXSW, which featured 700 free comics from the Marvel One series. It’s an amazing offer, as you have access to some great titles like A + X, All-New X-Men, Avengers Arena and loads more. However, this offer is currently on hold as the demand was so high that Comixology‘s servers just couldn’t cope.
The issues were affecting not just the Comixology website, but also the Marvel comics app on iOS and Android – to the point where I was only able to download about 12 of the titles on offer. Then I had continual log-in issues on Android, and the website was 404’ing and giving server timeouts.
Due to the insanely-high demand, Comixology has “paused” the offer at present – commenting on their blog “Unfortunately we became overwhelmed by the immense response. We’re still struggling to keep our systems up.”
Comixology CEO David Steinberger continued by saying “We’ll be communicating with you as often as we can and deeply appreciate the outpouring of support we’ve seen from our customers while we right the ship.”
If you want to take advantage of the free 700 issues (which you bloody well should do if you’re at all interested in Marvel comics!), then go to this page, and enter your email address to be informed when the offer is reinstated.
You can read the CEO’s full statement on the Comixology Blog.