Amazon's site stumbled out of the Prime Day gate on Monday as pages were slow to load at 3 p.m. EDT when the sale began.
Twitter erupted as people waiting to buy sales found messages saying something went wrong on Amazon's ends. 404 error pages with dogs are a nice touch, but probably not what Amazon was going for.
Amazon[1] seemed to stabilize as of 3:30 p.m. EDT somewhat, but if you clicked on "Shop All Deals" from the main Prime Day home page you may or may not get the listing. One common problem loop went like this:
- On the Amazon home page, under the current graphic promoting Prime Day, clicking on the Shop All Deals button takes you to another page, with the same graphic.
- The second screen may or may not get you deals. By the third click you are back to the logo.
- On the Amazon home page titled Shop Deals by Interest, and clicking on any of those sale items takes you to the logo again.
- Searching a product specifically seems to work.
There was no official word from Amazon about what was going on exactly. All Amazon Web Services offerings were running normally.
Prime Day 2018 is expected to set another record for Amazon. The duration of the sale was extended from 30 hours in 2017 to 36 in 2018. Prime Day deals will also cover four new markets to reach 17. And there's a greater selection and tie-ins to Whole Foods and Amazon subscription services.
Historically, Prime Day generates sales, as well as Prime subscriptions, which generate more revenue for Amazon over time. Prime Day 2018 is also expected to be an inflection point for voice shopping.
One workaround is