Prime Day: Amazon website suffers outages on its biggest annual sale

Amazon’s website suffered outages as soon as Prime Day sales kicked off on July 16. People across the US, Europe and Asia reported facing difficulties to make successful transactions on the e-commerce platform.

Some were unable to enter the site, while others could not enter specific product pages. (AFP)

Users in the US and elsewhere in the world struggled to access Amazon's website shortly after its biggest annual sale, Prime Day, got underway.

Many reported that Amazon's website had crashed, showing them only an error message that read: "sorry, something went wrong on our end." Users experiences similar errors on both the desktop site and the mobile app.

Others also reported experiencing problems with Amazon's video streaming services and its virtual assistant Alexa. While most of the issues were reported from the US, users in other continents faced problems as well.

DownDetector, a third-party platform that tracks internet outages, reported issues from Europe, Africa, South America, Russia, Asia and Australasia. Some saw an error page featuring the "dogs of Amazon" and were unable to enter the site, while others could not enter specific product pages.

US users were affected the most by Amazon outage (Downdetector)

US users were affected the most by Amazon outage (Downdetector)

Many were unable to complete purchases at checkout, while others reported that the "deals" page and "Shop all deals" button had disappeared from the site.

Does #Amazon have a deal on servers? Asking for Amazon so their site doesn't crash next year. #PrimeDay

— Stephanie Cano (@CStephanieM) July 16, 2018

Amazon thinks they can put pictures of corgis on their crash page to offset the pure anger of everyone attempting to prime day shop. Ain't gonna happen. pic.twitter.com/8P2nCFZ9DH

— Becca (@bec_kaw) July 16, 2018

This Amazon #PrimeDay crash dog is really givin the "I'm disappointed in you" look, he knows you were about to drop a ton of cash on useless stuff and he's here to shut you down pic.twitter.com/bus2E3b3Sl

— Ryan Fritsch (@fritsch_ryan) July 16, 2018

Amazon's Prime Day sales debuted in 2015 and in the next two years it become one of the biggest shopping days. The 36-hour event was projected to break records again this year, with industry analysts estimating the company could make at least $3.4 billion in sales.

(With inputs from IANS)