Traffic surge on Amazon Prime Day buckles servers, leads to hours of glitches

UPDATE 3:30 p.m. EDT, July 19: 

Amazon failed to secure enough servers capable of handling the traffic surge on Prime Day, one of the tech giant's biggest shopping days of the year, causing a series of glitches that temporarily affected some customers.

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The information comes from CNBC, which obtained internal Amazon documents on the problem.

Amazon also had to add servers manually to handle the traffic, CNBC reported.

"A breakdown in an internal system called Sable, which Amazon uses to provide compute and storage services to its retail and digital businesses, caused a series of glitches across other services that depend on it, like Prime, authentication, and video playback," according to CNBC, citing Amazon documents.

Despite the outage, which lasted for hours, Amazon said this year’s Prime Day was the “biggest shopping event” in the company’s history, with over 100 million products sold over a 36-hour period.

ORIGINAL STORY 3:30 p.m. EDT, July 16:

Amazon Prime Day started at 3 p.m. Eastern time today, but not without some glitches.

CNBC reported that customers complained of errors on desktop and mobile. According to the outlet, some customers got an error page featuring "dogs of Amazon." On those pages, a photo of a dog appears with the text, "Sorry. Something went wrong on our end," "Sorry. We couldn't find that page," or a similar error message. The dog photo changes with each refresh. There are more than a dozen dog images.

 

Visiting Amazon.com, navigating to the Prime Day page and clicking on “shop all deals,” or “shop deals by interest” led some users to a redirect loop to the “shop all deals” page.

Related: Amazon glitch: Here's how to get on the Amazon Prime site

According to Tech Crunch, direct links to product pages work fine, including direct links to specific products on the Prime Day page.

Amazon has not commented on the reports about Prime Day site glitches. The Associated Press reported that the extent of the outage is not clear.

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