Luxury skincare brand loses £8million in Black Friday pricing blunder

The bargain deal caused a frenzy of traffic to Foreo.com, which caused the website to crash - but not before 38,575 of the devices had been sold. Picture: John Devlin

An IT technician at Foreo is believed to be responsible for slashing the price of its UFO Smart Mask Device by 96 per cent.

The bargain deal caused a frenzy of traffic to Foreo.com, which caused the website to crash - but not before 38,575 of the devices had been sold.

Remarkably, Foreo founder Filip Sedic has agreed to honour the purchases - creating a £7.7million loss.

He said: "When I heard the news of this glitch, of course my first reaction was a tad shocked.

"Then when I heard the extent of the glitch in terms of almost 40,000 UFO products I realised how big this mistake had cost us.

"Saying that, there is nothing else like the UFO on the market and if news of our error was reaching thousands and thousands of people around the globe in just two hours then our fans were clearly more eagle eyed than us over the Black Friday madness."

The blunder, which affected the Foreo.com site globally, is thought to have started around 9.30pm on Friday when an surge of irregular traffic caused the site to crash for the first time.

Technicians assumed it was driven purely by Black Friday interest, unaware it was a major error which saw the UFO mask reduced.

At the height of the incident, 20 UFOs were being purchased per second across the globe before the mistake was rectified at around midnight.

The blunder is believed to have been caused by a technician wrongly entering the price of a much cheaper but similar-sounding UFU treatment which usually retails at 9.99 USD.

Foreo describes the UFO as a "transcendent smart mask treatment" which "combines advanced dermal technologies with exclusive Korean mask formulas for a decadent facial treatment in seconds".

Mr Sedic added: "While we lost over 10 million USD, we gained almost 40,000 new customers and to me that is the silver lining to this error and the Christmas spirit.

"So to confirm, we will be honoring all UFO orders and shipping as usual to everyone who completed the purchase on Friday."