The websites of Dixons Retail Group electronics stores have gone down today - knocking over Currys, PC World and Dixons.co.uk.

The sites have been offline since breakfast, but there's been some confusion about the cause of the outage.

Initially visitors to the Currys' site had a "503 Unavailable Error" page pop up, then a page that declared the site was down due to too much traffic and now the site says it's under maintenance, readers told The Reg.

A Dixons Group spokesperson confirmed that the site had been out since 8am GMT.

"We are working to fix the issue as soon as possible," he said.

"It would appear fibres have been damaged as a result of roadworks," he added, although he didn't explain why different outage messages had been displayed throughout the day. ®