Report: Amazon “temporarily killed all international traffic” to deal with Prime Day outage

Remember three days ago? I know, that was at least 10 news cycles ago, so it may be hard to recall, but that was the date of this year’s Prime Day event. Amazon offered fleeting discounts on select items, and like moths to a flame, hordes of users flocked to the website. Indeed, so many people surfed to Amazon that many visitors were met with error messages due to the traffic overload.

According to a new report from CNBC, which cites internal documents, the issue was that Amazon didn’t have enough servers to account for the insane traffic, and that its auto-scaling program likely didn’t work properly. To try and alleviate the problem, the company had to “temporarily kill of all international traffic,” among other things.

Amazon reportedly starting having issues as soon as Prime Day began. The company implemented fixes, including switching to a simpler home page, and then deciding to cut international traffic. It then added servers manually to further deal with the issue.

Ultimately, despite the technical glitches, Amazon was still able to sell a ton of products. The company said it saw record sales, selling more than 100 million products during this year’s event. Many people, however, weren’t thrilled about the site downtime. I guess they’ll have wait until next year to get the good deals.

We reached out to Amazon and will update if we hear back.