On Amazon Prime Day, site and app crash; shoppers left in lurch instead see photos of dogs

Elizabeth Weise | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Amazon's website crashed after launching Prime Day After launching it’s fourth annual Prime Day, Amazon’s site immediately crashed. Veuer's Sam Berman has the full story

SAN FRANCISCO – Amazon suffered a rare glitch at the start of its 36-hour 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 billion, according to analysis by Coresight Research.

In a statement, Amazon said that some customers were having difficulty shopping and it was quickly working to resolve the issue.

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 unusually 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.

This was the first Prime Day in which Amazon had a significant brick and mortar presence, after its acquisition of the Whole Foods Market chain of grocery stores last year. Amazon now has as least 479 Whole Foods stores, 16 bookstores, one Amazon Go convenience store and more than a dozen pop up stores in malls.

Those physical stores didn't seem to make much of a difference. While Amazon's Prime Day sale has been compared to Black Friday, there were none of the crowds, the excitement or even the buzz of that annual holiday shopping extravaganza.

At the Amazon bookstore in Walnut Creek, the stream of customer coming into the store was steady but there were no crowds and no one lined up for the launch of the sale at noon.

In the hour before Prime Day launched at noon on the West Coast, the Whole Foods Market in Berkeley, Calif. had Prime Day signs and promotions up for both food items (Honey Nut Cheerios and Raincoast Crisps crackers) and Amazon products (Echo Dot smart speakers and Fire TV sticks.)

What it didn't have was crowds or customers lined up at the door awaiting the launch of Prime Day. Merely normal shoppers going about their businesses.

The only real difference from a regular day was the table of Prime Day temporary tattoos on offer at the front of the store. They featured popsicles, lemons, avocados, and a Whole Foods shopping bag. However few customers seemed to be availing themselves of the chance to adorn their bodies with Amazon Prime Day messages.

For some, the sale came as a complete, though welcome, surprise.

Aravel Forbes, visiting from Hawaii, was doing some shopping at the Whole Foods on Monday but didn't realize there was any special sale one. She didn't know she could get grocery discounts until the cashier told her. when she heard about it, she was pleased. “I’m very grateful (Prime items are) on sale, that’ll save me a lot of money."

Ryan Suppe reporting from Walnut Creek, Calif. Ashley Wong reporting from Berkeley, Calif.