Ruff time for Amazon Prime Day shoppers

Heavy traffic causes site, app to crash; some shoppers saw photos of dogs

SAN FRANCISCO – Amazon suffered a rare glitch at the start of its 36hour online sales bonanza Monday, turning away would-be shoppers browsing for Prime Day deals with notices that heavy web traffic had caused its site and app to crash.

Instead, the online retail giant, which also owns cloud computing juggernaut Amazon Web Services, showed shoppers a selection of dog photos.

Last year’s Prime Day sale was estimated to have generated about $2.4 billion in sales, and this year’s 36-hour sale was predicted to reach $3.4 bil- lion, according to Coresight Research.

Amazon was determined to make sure Americans knew it was Prime Day, and the effort seemed to have paid off with a flood of visitors who appeared to have overwhelmed the company’s systems. The company spent $3.1 million on its Prime Day awareness ad on television this year, an analysis by Market Track, a Chicago-based ad and pricing analysis firm, found.

After its fourth annual Prime Day sale started at noon West Coast time Monday, it was not possible to make purchases in the first hour of the sale. Users could access their online shopping cart, but when they attempted to actually purchase something, they got a note saying, “Sorry, we’re experiencing un- usually heavy traffic. Please try again in a few seconds. Your items are still waiting in your cart.”

The much-vaunted Amazon deals were also not available during the outage. When users attempted to click on the “Shop Deals by Interest” portion of the main page, the website only allowed users to click through to a page that said “Shop All Deals,” which then took them back to the home page.

On smart phones, things were no better. The Amazon app returned a photo of a contrite-looking dog and the words, “Uh-Oh. Something went wrong on our end.” The photo of the dog switched each time users tried to log in, so that they got an image of a new, though still remorseful, dog.