Amazon Prime Day sale: Users report issues with the website
What's the story
The much-awaited Amazon Prime Day sales, which kicked-off on July 16, seems to be experiencing difficulties. Amazon had touted the event as the "biggest day ever", but if reports are to be believed, people, globally, are facing difficulties accessing Amazon's website, specific product pages, making successful transactions etc. Reportedly, Amazon's video streaming service and virtual assistant Alexa are also affected. Here's more.
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Over $3.4bn in sales expected for Prime Day 2018
Amazon started its Prime Day annual sale event in 2015, and over the next two years, it went on to become one of the biggest shopping events. The 36-hour event is expected to shatter records again this year, with over $3.4bn in sales expected.
Reports
Reports of crashes not just from US
However, many users, on both mobile and desktop platforms, reported that Amazon's website had crashed, and that an error message reading, "Sorry, something went wrong on our end" was being displayed. While most of these reports poured in from the US, people from other parts of the world also reported outages and issues wherein they couldn't enter the site or visit specific product pages.
Twitter Post
Users aren't pleased about it either
Amazon thinks they can put pictures of corgis on their crash page to offset the pure anger of everyone attempting to prime day shop. Ain’t gonna happen. pic.twitter.com/8P2nCFZ9DH
— Becca (@bec_kaw) July 16, 2018
Details
Amazon's website malfunctioned just four minutes into the sale
DownDetector, a third-party website outage tracking platform, said that Amazon's website hadn't been functioning properly since 3:04 pm EDT, just four minutes after the sale began. There were also glitches wherein clicking on a category of deals would send a user back to the homepage. Notably, these issues were reported from Europe, Africa, South America, Russia, Asia and Australasia, apart from the US.
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What Amazon had to say about the issue
"Some customers are having difficulty shopping, and we're working to resolve this issue quickly. Many are shopping successfully - in the first hour of Prime Day in the US, customers have ordered more items compared to the first hour last year," said an Amazon spokesperson.