Amazon crashes on Prime Day, creating a less than prime shopping experience

It looks like this year’s Prime Day will now be known as The Great Amazon Prime Day Crash of 2018. Not long after the e-commerce site kicked off its day of deals at 3:00 p.m. ET, the site began crashing.

Many who went to the main Prime Day home page saw, instead, a landing page with the message, “Sorry, something went wrong” and a photo featuring one of the dogs of Amazon, a ploy to lighten the mood of unhappy shoppers unable to access Prime Day discounts.

Shoppers experienced everything from the main Prime Day home page failing to launch to product searches returning zero items or product links leading to error pages. Other users were sent back to the Prime Day home page whenever they tried to go to category pages; or, if they were able to add Prime Day deals to their cart, they received an error message when they tried to check out.

As several took to Twitter to complain about Amazon going down on what was previously the company’s biggest sales day, Amazon continued its online Prime Day campaigns across various networks, including promoted posts on Twitter and Reddit.

Amazon finally responded to reports the site was crashing at 5:00 p.m. ET (two hours after it began experiencing problems) but was still touting discounts and boasting that it had already sold more products during the first hour of this year’s event than the first hour of Prime Day 2017. (It’s worth noting here that Amazon added four new countries to the list of available locations this year — further opening up Prime Day to international markets.)

This year’s Prime Day is scheduled to run 36 hours — six more hours than last year’s event — and will last until midnight on July 17. The company reported last year’s Prime Day was its biggest shopping day ever and brought in the most Amazon Prime members ever during a single 24-hour period. It also said that thousands of SMBs generated more than $50,000 each during last year’s sales event.

Even though Amazon says it sold more during the first hour of this year’s event compared to last year, it remains to be seen whether or not the site’s technical difficulties will significantly impact its overall Amazon Prime Day results for this year.

About The Author

Amy Gesenhues

Amy Gesenhues is Third Door Media’s General Assignment Reporter, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs.com, SoftwareCEO.com, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy’s articles.