Free Donut Mania Overwhelms DunkinDonuts.com Website

The economy must be pretty bad out there because people are going crazy over free donuts.

Today is National Donut Day. The holiday is celebrated the first Friday of each June. It began in 1938 as an event by the Salvation Army to honor women who gave out donuts to soldiers during World War I.

Now, it's an excuse for donut stores to give out free donuts to Americans. Krispy Kreme is simply giving away one donut per customer, no purchase necessary. Dunkin' Donuts, on the other hand, is giving away a free donut with a purchase of a beverage (soda and cool drinks don't count).

The offer is available while supplies last and with participating branches.

The Krispy Kreme website seems to be working fine. Dunkin' Donut's website, however, is not doing so well. When IBTimes tried to access it in the morning (Eastern Time), the website sometimes loaded very slowly, sometimes didn't load at all, and sometimes loaded within a few seconds.

DunkinDonuts.com receives about 770,000 US visitors per month, according to quantcast.

A Dunkin' Donuts spokesperson said the following:

You're correct that the excitement of National Donut Day has resulted in higher than normal volume of visits to our web site. We're aware of the issue and are actively working to enhance the performance of the site, especially so that Dunkin' Donuts fans can easily locate their closest Dunkin' Donuts restaurant in order to enjoy our National Donut Day offer of a free donut with beverage purchase.