Amazon Prime Day, the retail giant’s big, annual sales event, started off with a big snafu, as the site crashed minutes after launching.
As The Verge reported, people experienced Amazon outages differently. Some visitors got full-on error pages, while others could still access the individual item sites. When I tried, I could get to Amazon.com, but whenever I clicked on “Shop All Deals” or tried to Shop a particular category, I wound up in a loop asking me to click on “Shop All Deals” again. You can see a gif of my experience here:
This is a big embarrassment for Amazon, who has built a business on helping other companies scale their infrastructure to meet heavy demand. But depending on how widepsread the outages are, it can impact the number of units vendors can sell through this special promotion.
Here at The Spoon, we care mostly about kitchen tech and early on, both the Anova and ChefSteps sous vide wands were discounted for Prime Day as well as the Instant Pot. Not only could the outage impact the number of units sold, but it could also have a potential ripple effect. Consumers who may not normally try out new kitchen tech might be enticed by a special Prime deal… but only if they can learn about it and reach it.
Of course, with sites like The Wirecutter providing direct access to sale item pages that seem to be working just fine, this blip could be nothing. We reached out to a smart kitchen vendor with an item on sale today to see if they experienced any impact and will update this story if we hear back.