Amazon Prime Day, one of the biggest online shopping days of the year, experienced a glitch causing thousands of shoppers to be redirected to an error page displaying an image of puppies in order to placate the masses.
Amazon Prime day is one of the most popular annual shopping days, holding its own against the likes of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. An exclusive day for Amazon Prime members, Amazon featured a record 36-hour-long shopping holiday on Monday, July 16, but website glitches at the start of the day resulted in error pages and endless loops for some consumers.
When users logged onto Amazon to shop among the site’s hundreds of thousands of deals, users were met with an image of a cute dog and an error message. Sometimes, the “shop all deals” button” would disappear entirely. This happened both online and through the mobile app.
Whether a consumer was one of the 76% of homeowners looking for tools to remodel their kitchen during home renovations or a gamer trying to score exclusive video gaming systems, Amazon prime let down a large number of people in the first hours of the sale. This led to hundreds of consumers venting their frustrations with the retail giant online.
“I should probably take the Amazon Prime crash as a sign that I don’t need to buy anything this year,” wrote one user, reported by Time.
Despite Amazon’s 1.5% gain in stock that morning, the online retailer fell another 1% in the hours following the online snafu.
Amazon’s inability to handle the internet traffic was also a problem for its cloud partners. Amazon is reportedly the world’s leading provider of cloud technology. In 2012, nearly 90% of small businesses saw a security breach; with cloud systems supplied through Amazon and other online service providers, this number has dropped marginally. With the most recent snafu, subscribers may turn to other businesses.
This was good news for other retailers hoping to compete with Amazon’s exclusive Prime Day deals. Retail giants like Target, eBay, Kohl’s, and Macy’s attempted to take sales away from the 76% of online shoppers that plan to visit Amazon Prime by offering their own deals around the same time.
As July becomes an exceedingly important month for online shoppers across the globe, it’s expected that Amazon’s fortune will keep growing. It’s been proven, however, that a cute, cuddly dog isn’t enough to placate angry masses.
