Screenshot by Joan Solsman/CNET All eyes in retail are on Amazon this Monday, and not just for good reasons. The world's largest e-commerce company kicked off its annual Prime Day sale today with a series of glitches that plagued its site and mobile app for over an hour in the US, based on visits from CNET staff and a host of reports on social media. Outage reports spiked around noon PT, according to DownDetector.com, just as Amazon Prime Day officially started. Amazon.com in the US appeared to be hit the hardest. Lesser issues were reported in parts of Canada, Mexico and Europe. Now playing: Watch this: Prime Day 2018 and the 404 dogs of Amazon As of 1 p.m. PT, a full hour into the sale, there appeared to be a handful of errors on the site. The homepage was generally available, but errors were coming up at checkout, items in shopping carts were disappearing, mobile alerts were delayed, products searches were sometimes offering no results, and some shoppers were caught in a "Shop All Deals" loop. Soon after, it appeared the site was beginning to recover, with the main Prime Day homepage becoming available. Roughly two hours after the outage began, Amazon acknowledged the ongoing problems in short statement: "Some customers are having difficulty shopping, and we're working to resolve this issue quickly." It added that US customers ordered more items in the first hour of Prime Day than last year, despite the outages. Amazon didn't offer an explanation for what was causing the issues. Monday's problems weren't the first time that Amazon experienced a notable website error during Prime Day. In 2016, a computer glitch prevented people from checking out their purchases online in the early hours of the sale. When asked about the site running properly during the increased demand, Jamil Ghani, vice president of Prime international, earlier this month told CNET: "We feel prepared for what's to come." con: @amazon prime day site down pro: doggo pictures pic.twitter.com/szN0h4JPOa — elizabeth wozobski (@EWozobski) July 16, 2018 The problems could be due to an early rush of web traffic, though for now that's uncertain. Amazon is used to surges of consumer traffic following over 20 years operating its website during the height of holiday shopping. The company is also a leader in operating server farms and cloud computing, thanks to its highly lucrative Amazon Web Services business. AWS runs Amazon's sites and appeared to be working normally Monday, according to its online status page. However, Prime Day offers significant challenges for even Amazon, since the sale is consolidated to a short period of time -- not a whole shopping season -- kicks off at a set period across the globe and is focused on just one retailer. Amazon also added four new countries to Prime Day this year: Australia, Singapore, Netherlands and Luxembourg. That scenario invites a big wave of shoppers to arrive at Amazon right at the beginning of the sale, which could temporarily overwhelm its capacity. Additionally, Prime Day offers its own set of over 1 million deals globally and a customized homepage, adding to the complexity of operating the sale. "We've seen this sort of thing happen on Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the past with other retailers," said eMarketer retail analyst Andrew Lipsman. "In many ways, it's a double edged sword. On the one hand, you don't want to erode consumer trust by having an outage. On the other side, it's often a reflection of higher-than-expected demand." He added that consumer shopping tends to recover if an outage is fixed fairly quickly. amazon down on prime day heellpp #AmazonPrimeDay pic.twitter.com/IQRpr72iDw — Lisa Scherzer (@lisascherzer) July 16, 2018 My @amazon Prime Day experience. Multiple refreshes and still the same. Is @awscloud down too? pic.twitter.com/MMRCglgGK1 — Mike Baranski (@mikebaranski) July 16, 2018 Because Prime Day is going on for 36 hours this year -- up from 30 hours last year -- Amazon has an opportunity to come back from the weak start. But, the problems may make it harder for the company to break its single-day sales record, which it managed to do for the past two Prime Day sales. Amazon last year said Prime Day sales grew by 60 percent from the year earlier and that more new members joined Prime than on any other day in Amazon history. Overall, Prime Day raked in an estimated $2.5 billion to $2.9 billion in global sales, including sales from third-party vendors, financial firm Cowen said last year. First published at 12:19 p.m. PT. Updated at 2:21 p.m. PT: Adds more background throughout and updates the site's performance, as well as an official statement from Amazon. 'Hello, humans': Google's Duplex could make Assistant the most lifelike AI yet. CNET Magazine: Check out a sample of the stories in CNET's newsstand edition.<doc-sep>Amazon.com Inc.’s site crashed late Monday afternoon, interrupting the flow of sales during the e-commerce giant’s 2018 Prime Day. At 3.10 p.m. Eastern, the site AMZN, +0.19% was showing a message accompanied by an image of a dog saying: “Sorry, something went wrong on our end,” directing users to try to go back to the home page. That resulted in another similar message with a different image of a dog. MarketWatch has reached out to Amazon for an explanation. The company has tweeted a comment about the outage. “There is no doubt that this will erode sales and deter some customers from buying,” said Global Data Retail’s Managing Director Neil Saunders in a note. “The outage is especially problematic as many of Amazon’s Prime deals are promoted for a set window of time - something that could cause a great deal of frustration for potential customers.” Amazon heavily promoted this year’s Prime Day as it has in years past, highlighting discounts on Amazon devices and private-label goods as well as the back-to-school, back-to-college, grocery and other deals to be had. Whole Foods Market is also included in this year’s event. Don’t miss: Amazon Prime Day will take a bite out of the food sector as Whole Foods is included “The good news is that after extensive marketing and hype, Amazon has clearly pushed demand for its Prime extravaganza to an all-time high - maybe even more than it anticipated,” said Saunders. “Fortunately, that means the day will likely be a financial success even with the various system problems. That this year’s event is longer than in previous years will also play to Amazon’s advantage.” Meanwhile, shoppers took to Twitter to vent their frustration. The stock hit a fresh intraday low of $1,814.45 immediately after the outage, after being up 1.1% just before the kick-off. Shares closed up 0.5% for an eighth-straight gain, and fourth-straight record close. See also:Jeff Bezos becomes the richest person in modern history amid Amazon Prime Day kickoff<doc-sep>Amazon might not have been ready for primetime. The retail giant's website ran into some glitches on Monday almost immediately after the kick-off of Prime Day, the company's summer edition of Cyber Monday. The apparent outage appears to have begun around 3:05 p.m. ET, according to DownDetector.com. That's roughly five minutes after the official start of Prime Day, a company the holiday created and turned into one of the marquee shopping events (and gimmicks) of the year. Shoppers who tried to navigate the site were greeted with images of dogs and an error message: "Uh-oh. Something went wrong on our end." But as of 5 p.m. ET, many Prime Day links were up and running. Amazon later said that it was "working to resolve this issue quickly." In a statement emailed to NBC News, the company said that "many are shopping successfully," and that in the first hour of Prime Day in the United States, customers scooped up more products than in the same time frame last year. It was not immediately clear if the glitch affected shoppers nationwide or just in select parts of the United States.<doc-sep>Update: Here’s how to get around Amazon’s error. Use smile.amazon.com. TechCrunch confirmed this workaround works. It’s not just you. Amazon Prime Day started 15 minutes ago, and so far, it’s not going well for Amazon. The landing page for Prime Day does not work. When most links are clicked, visitors are sent to an error page or to a landing page that sends readers back to the main landing page. Direct links to the product pages, either from outside links or the single product placement on the landing page, seem to work fine. I just bought this tent two weeks ago for $120. Some users are reporting errors when completing a purchase, too. This is a huge blow to Amazon and its faux holiday Prime Day. The retailer has been pushing this event for weeks and there are some great deals to be had. It’s not a good look for the world’s largest retailer even though the retailer saw glitches last year, too. Other retailers jumped on Amazon’s bandwagon and are running big sales around Prime Day. As of this post’s publication, both Walmart and Target are not suffering site outages and probably love Amazon’s outage. Also, this. Diane Greene is the only person celebrating Amazon Prime Day so far. — megan quinn (@msquinn) July 16, 2018 3:30pm EDT: It’s 30 minutes past the launch of Prime Day and the landing page and deal navigation page is still down.<doc-sep>
Amazon’s website has been experiencing issues for hours now due to heavy online traffic on Prime Day, the e-commerce giant’s made-up holiday designed to boost sales. According to DownDetector.com, Amazon has been experiencing issues since around 3:05PM ET today, with a large spike in reports immediately after Prime Day officially began at 3PM ET / 12PM PT. It’s not clear how widespread the outage has been. According to DownDetector, the outage is restricted to the US, and it appears to still be affecting large parts of California and the New York as of 5:30PM ET, with a smattering of smaller outages in the Pacific Northwest and other parts of the country. Some users have reported being able to access product pages but not the Amazon.com homepage. Some are not experiencing issues at all, while others are seeing the company’s well-known “dogs of Amazon” page, which is the company’s placeholder art during full-blown outages that highlights well-known pets of Amazon employees. amazon down on prime day heellpp #AmazonPrimeDay pic.twitter.com/IQRpr72iDw — Lisa Scherzer (@lisascherzer) July 16, 2018 Bad news: Amazon seems to be crashing from demand for Prime Day sales. Good news: Amazon's error page is amazing. pic.twitter.com/lhUcipHTZX — Seth Fiegerman (@sfiegerman) July 16, 2018 Another common issue that appears to be popping up for the users that can get Amazon’s website to load is a never-ending loop between the homepage and an incomplete deals page. In that situation, clicking on the “Shop All Deals” button takes you from the homepage to another, similar-looking page that prompts you to click the same button again, which will then take you back to the homepage. Another issue is users being able to load items into their shopping cart, but the shopping cart empties itself immediately. Currently experiencing a never ending loop of "Shop All Prime Deals" on @amazon, is anyone else seeing this loop too? #PrimeDay2018 pic.twitter.com/OO9GXBbIl1 — Meghan Anders (@m_anders89) July 16, 2018 In a statement released at 5PM ET, Amazon acknowledged the issue for the first time, writing on Twitter that “many are shopping successfully” and noting that there are still 34 hours left for Prime Day deals. It appears the company’s website is now functioning normally for some users while Amazon works to resolve the issue, though many are still reporting issues with adding items to their carts, checkout, and just getting into the deals portal from Amazon’s homepage. Last year, Amazon’s Prime Day generated an estimated $1 billion in sales from the 30-hour event, which roughly equates to around $34 million every hour. Other estimates put Amazon’s Prime Day haul closer to $2.8 billion, which would mean almost triple that revenue amount per hour. Regardless, it’s safe to assume Amazon is taking an outage like this very seriously — not just because it looks bad, but because there is significant financial incentive to make sure every minute of Prime Day can result in a maximum number of completed orders. According to Internet Retailer, this year’s Prime Day is projected to earn Amazon $4 billion in sales, so long as the site is up and running. Update July 16th, 3:43PM ET: Added additional information about the outage and Amazon’s Prime Day revenue history. Update July 16th, 5:20PM ET: Added statement from Amazon.