Prime Day update: Amazon suffers rare service issues

Amazon has been experiencing website issues during Prime Day 2018, which kicked off yesterday and is running for 36 hours, six hours longer than last year.

US bargain hunters have taken to social media to report slow loading pages and post screenshots of error messages, some of which featured pictures of sad-looking dogs and the text "something went wrong on our end”.

It seems that the problem is simply traffic.“The failure of Amazon's systems and sites is rare: the online behemoth is one of the most advanced digital retailers and is usually able to cope with even extremely high levels of demand,” says Neil Saunders, Managing Director at GlobalData Retail.“However, the volume of visitors this Prime Day has caused Amazon's websites on both mobile and desktop platforms to crash. While service is not completely down, it is spotty and browsing and purchasing are extremely difficult and time-consuming.”

“There is no doubt that this will erode sales and deter some customers from buying. The outage is especially problematic as many of Amazon's Prime deals are promoted for a set window of time - something that could cause a great deal of frustration for potential customers,” he adds.

“The good news is that after extensive marketing and hype, Amazon has clearly pushed demand for its Prime extravaganza to an all-time high, maybe even more than it anticipated. Fortunately, that means the day will likely be a financial success even with the various system problems. That this year's event is longer than in previous years will also play to Amazon's advantage.”