There's at least one good reason why some retailers have removed the £89 HP TouchPad tablet altogether; the traffic it attracts literally kills websites, acting like a massive distributed denial of service, far bigger than most of them experience during the holiday season.

Sites like Equanet, Dabs, Misco, Comet, Staples and BT Shop have either suffered from very slow speeds, have been sporadically accessible or down altogether (Equanet and Staples). This translates into some significant revenue losses especially as this is happening to business websites during working hours on week days.

In addition, the margin on these tablets is already going to be extremely thin because of the discount which means that they're also losing money since other customers trying to access their websites simply can't.

Thousands of Touchpad tablets have been sold over the last 24 hours and we've also noticed that rather than having a few websites stocking the Touchpad at any time, the tablet was systematically on offer on one website each time.

The end result was a direct DDoS like hit on the websites that stocked the Touchpad thanks to the thousands of users trying to get one.