Amazon site crash leaves shoppers without deal of day

Online shoppers looking to buy toothpaste, clothes or any of the countless items on Amazon.com yesterday afternoon instead were treated to an error message and a picture of a furry dog or cat in a rare outage for the e-commerce giant.

The outage lasted several hours. Downdetector.com, a website that tracks online outages, said reports were concentrated in the Northeast and the West Coast.

The message stating, “SORRY something went wrong on our end,” greeted would-be online shoppers clicking on Amazon product links.

The issues appeared to be resolved around 5 p.m. yesterday evening.

Last year, Amazon sold just under $80 billion in merchandise in North America, meaning yesterday’s outage could have cost the company millions of dollars in sales.

The error message was shown above pictures of so-called “dogs of Amazon, including Butters and Marge, and Peek. Amazon said those dogs are owned by employees who can bring their canine colleagues into the office.

Amazon has developed a reputation for rarely — if ever — going down, so yesterday’s outage was particularly remarkable.

Still, this is the second outage Amazon has seen this year. Earlier this month, Amazon Web Services, the company’s server-for-hire service, went down, bringing with it hundreds if not thousands of websites that rely on AWS. That outage only lasted a few hours, and Amazon eventually said an employee error was to blame. Amazon Web Services did not appear to be affected by yesterday’s issues.

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.