Amazon’s website suffered from glitches during the first few minutes of its annual Prime Day sales extravaganza.
The e-commerce giant went into full Prime Day marketing mode at noon PT on Monday. But many prospective customers took to Twitter to report that they couldn’t make it past the Prime Day landing page, which advertised deals for $20 off the Echo Dot device and $30 off the Echo, among other discounts. Clicking on any of the links resulted in a Prime Day promotion page that didn’t list any of the products that were on sale.
The website appeared to be back up and running about 45 minutes after the start of Prime Day but problems continued to persist throughout the afternoon, with many users hitting error pages that showed pictures of the dogs of Amazon.
Related Stories
About two hours after the start of Prime Day, Amazon released a statement via Twitter that acknowledged the problems with the website and noted “we’re working to resolve this issue quickly.” The company added that already “customers have ordered more items compared to the first hour last year.”
— Amazon.com (@amazon) July 16, 2018
Amazon launched Prime Day in 2015. After initial complaints that the deals weren’t worth it, the annual event has become a phenomenon. Media outlets spend days prepping for stories about the best deals and other retailers, including Target, hold their own sales at the same time.
In 2017, Amazon reported that Prime Day resulted in its biggest sale day in its history, surpassing other big shopping days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. All told, Amazon saw a 60 percent increase in sales during the same 30 hours of the sale compared with the previous year’s Prime Day.
The event is also a way to drive more people to subscribe to Amazon Prime, the company’s membership program that offers free two-day shipping and other perks for a $119 annual fee.
This year, Amazon extended the deals, planning to runs sales for 36 hours from midday Monday to end of day Tuesday.
