Amazon.com crashes during peak sales on 2018 Prime Day

Amazon.com has crashed on Monday afternoon, just as the e-commerce giant was holding sales for its 2018 Prime Day.

Those who visited the site at 3.10 p.m. Eastern, were met with the message “Sorry, something went wrong on our end,” accompanied by the image of a dog. Consequently, prospective shoppers could not take advantage of the sales, which will be promoted only for a limited time.

“There is no doubt that this will erode sales and deter some customers from buying,” Global Data Retail’s Managing Director Neil Saunders told marketwatch.com in a note. “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 added.

The company reacted via Twitter and 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 US, 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.”

Ahead of the Prime Day kickoff, Jeff Bezos has officially become the richest person in modern history, in inflation-adjusted terms.

On Monday, Bezos’s net worth exceeded USD 150 billion. The rest of the list trails behind him by a staggering USD 50 billion: Gates sits second at USD 95 billion, and Warren Buffett comes in at No. 3, with a fortune of USD 82.6 billion.