‘Prime Day’ lands Amazon shoppers in the dog house

Website sends customers adorable puppy pictures instead of hotly sought-after discounts

The Amazon web site wobbled on Monday with glitches that displayed adorable puppies rather than the items that customers were seeking, a black eye for the online commerce giant on one of its key shopping days.

Customers for a time received an error message that stated something had gone wrong with the Amazon site and invited people to re-try their search or purchase attempts with Amazon Prime.

“Please go back and try again” or “go to the Amazon home page” were among the suggestions that some customers encountered. The pages also included photos of pets owned by Amazon employees.

Seattle-based Amazon acknowledged the glitch in a tweet.

“Some customers are having difficulty shopping,” Amazon stated on its official Twitter account. “We’re working to resolve this issue quickly.”

Some customers quickly took to Twitter to complain about the fail sale, though many were at least distracted by the cute dogs. Others suggested the Amazon Prime deals should be extended to Friday to make up for the inconvenience, though the company did not immediately indicate what it would do in response to the problem.

The effects of the glitch appeared to ease on Monday, according to the DownDetector site. That site

stated the woes began to surface somewhere soon after 12 noon on the West Coast.

About 39 percent of the problems were related to the Amazon site, 33 percent were connected to logging in and 26 percent were tied to checking out with a purchase, according to DownDetector.

The outages were primarily concentrated in California and the nation’s Northeast region, the DownDetector Amazon outage map indicated.

Still, Amazon indicated that commerce was underway during the early stages of Amazon Prime Day for most customers.

“Many are shopping successfully,” Amazon said of its customers in the tweet, which was posted about 2 p.m. on Monday.