Update June 2019: Amazon Prime Day 2019 is just a few weeks away. Find out dates, what to buy, what to avoid, and more in our Prime Day survival guide.
It seems there's such a thing as too many good deals. For about a quarter of an hour today, starting at around 3pm Eastern — the official time that Prime Day began — the super-retailer's homepage was down.
The homepage came back up about 15 minutes later, but issues still persisted, such as not being able to click on categories of deals. However, the site seemed to be functioning normally as of 4:30 pm ET.
In a statement to Tom's Guide, an Amazon spokesperson said:
"Some customers are having difficulty shopping, and we’re working to resolve this issue quickly. Many are shopping successfully – in the first hour of Prime Day in the U.S., customers have ordered more items compared to the first hour last year. There are hundreds of thousands of deals to come and more than 34 hours to shop Prime Day."
Considering the crash occurred around the start of Prime Day, it makes sense that Amazon may have briefly succumbed to a rush of traffic from users primed to take advantage of their deals. During that time, users trying to load Amazon.com were greeted with a "Sorry, something went wrong on our end" message screen featuring an adorable dog, such as Sheriff, seen above.
MORE: Best Amazon Prime Day Deals: Fire TV Stick, Echo Dot and More
The website-failure tracking downdetector.com notes it received 21,534 reports of Amazon being down. Editors' Note: this issue doesn't appear to be affecting individual product pages, so you should still be able to take advantage of deals.
It's unclear how much this outage will effect Amazon's sales, but Coresight Research expects shoppers to spend $3.4 billion during the Prime Day event, which lasts from 3pm Eastern today to 3am Eastern on Wednesday morning.
At around 3:50pm Eastern, a new issue presented itself. Clicking on a deal category, such as electronics, sent users back to the Shop All Deals homescreen. As of the time of publishing, #primedayfail is currently trending on Twitter.
Around 4:15pm, the homepage dropped the items on the left side of the screen, including the categories section that was sending users in the aforementioned loop.
At 4:30pm Eastern, the left side of the Amazon homepage regained items, but replaced the categories of deals with other, singular promoted deals.
Right now, with Prime just beginning, the early focus has been on how Amazon has lowered its Echo ($69), Fire 7 ($29) and Kindle ($49) devices to all-time low prices.
We have reached out to Amazon and will update this story should we receive comment.
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