Poor England boss Fabio Capello and his parade (charade?) of players - not only have they let down an entire nation of football-loving optimists but they are causing travel sites to crash.
UK-based online travel agency TravelRepublic says its website crashed on Monday this week after seeing a 33% jump in traffic compared to the same day last week.
The disastrous end to the England football team's limp showing at the FIFA World Cup in South Africa is believed to have seen a sudden surge in consumers looking to escape with late deals.
TravelRepublic admits it was unprepared for the increase in traffic - pattern which eventually led to the site having its best single day with visitor numbers for "several months".
IT director Chris Waite explains why the technology failed on this occasion:
"The crash was caused by our own bespoke visitor tracking software which was not able to cope with the load (slow write times to the database).
"We had to disable some of the visitor tracking data to get the site back online. Internally we call this the 'Go Faster Button', it strips away all the nice-to-have data (logging etc) to make the site go faster but leaves the customer experience unchanged apart from being faster."
Interestingly, website crashes ordinarily do not lead to travel companies explaining the inner workings of their systems to the outside world.
But Waite continues:
"It seems our database server wasn’t able to cope with the number of visits per second when inserting rows in to the visit detail table. We’ve now partitioned this functionality across two servers, so we should be ready for at least double the load now."
So now you all know what to do...