The PlayStation 5 has been restocked at Argos – and promptly disappeared.

In a series of events now familiar to the people hunting for PS5s, the restock was greeted with a frenzy of excitement that quickly turned to disappointment as it became clear that the limited number of consoles had already sold out.

The PlayStation 5 was released in November, but fans have struggled with high demand and limited stock in the months since.

The issues are particularly exacerbated by the fact that many of the consoles appear to be bought by automated systems before normal customers are able to buy them – with those PlayStations then being resold at higher prices, to take advantage of the high demand.

Many Argos customers did however say they had success buying the PlayStation 5 through the latest restock. Many reported that they had been online very early in the morning – somewhere between 1am and 3am – and having their consoles ready at their house by the morning UK time.

Argos had been offering a number of the consoles for collection from their stores. That may have helped minimise the number of bots that were able to take advantage of the new supply, given customers needed to be able to pick them up locally.

But yet more complained they had been unable to buy them or had run into issues the website, however. Some customers said they had been able to put the console into their basket but were unable to check it out, apparently because of the unusually large numbers of people attempting to buy it.

Shoppers reported seeing an error indicating “we can’t currently check stock”, and asking them to “please try again soon”, apparently due to issues at local stores.

Because the stock had become available at 1am, shoppers on Twitter reported having stayed up through the night in an attempt to make the website work, only to hit technical issues that meant they were unable to reserve or buy a PlayStation 5.