Amazon Website Crashes On Prime Day
Are you someone who likes to take advantage of Amazon Prime Day? We all love reduced prices in a sale, so there’s a good chance you found yourself logging on to Amazon on 16 July 2018, which was the day when the website gave customers super savings for a period of 36 hours.
But you may have had problems in your quest to bag a bargain if you live in America. At our the web design Wilmslow agency, we’ve noticed that many US customers complained about the site crashing due to heavy online traffic. According to DownDetector.com, Amazon had a large spike in reports for several hours, following its launch at 3pm ET.
What Were The Problems?
Considering that our Wilmslow web design company specialises in creating highly functional websites, we’re particularly interested in this story. According to press reports, a large amount of Americans couldn’t access the homepage, but some could reach the product pages. While others saw the company’s “dogs page”, which is another name for the error message because it shows a picture of a dog.
One customer saw the funny side by sending a tweet saying: “Bad news: Amazon seems to be crashing from demand for Prime Day sales. Good news: Amazon’s error page is amazing.”
What Did Customers See?
Here’s a brief list from our web design Wilmslow company of the other things that went wrong. Customers were…
- Stuck in a “never-ending loop” between the homepage and a deals page
- Unable to make the “Shop All Deals” button work effectively
- Unable to load their shopping cart. There were reports that the cart would load up and then empty itself immediately
Why Did It Happen?
At our Wilmslow web design agency we’ve done a bit of research to find out why this happened. According to the American TV channel CNBC, the website didn’t have enough servers to cope with the amount of traffic on the day. This also forced it to scale down its homepage and block international traffic, apparently.
The problem was solved by Amazon manually adding servers. But CBNC said that this maybe an example of a failure from the company’s “auto-scaling”, which is the name given to an approach in cloud computing where servers can be scaled up automatically, depending on the amount of traffic.
It Wasn’t Just The Amazon Website
While much of the coverage of the outage has focused on the website’s issues, there were also problems around the same time with the company’s voice-operated assistant Alexa. A streaming platform called Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, also had functionality problems, apparently, and some workers in the company’s warehouses found they couldn’t scan packages.
Any Lasting Effects?
Despite this glitch lasting a number of hours, it doesn’t appear to have caused any lasting damage to the company – or its profits. In fact, according to Amazon, this particular Prime Day has become its most successful so far. Unfortunately, it won’t reveal exact figures, but expert analysis from Feedvisor, which provides reports for online retailers, suggests that sales could be up 69 percent from last year.
And Amazon made light of any problems, with a press release that read: “It wasn’t all a walk in the (dog) park, we had a ruff start—we know some customers were temporarily unable to make purchases. We still have hundreds of thousands of new deals today.”
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