Image copyright Amazon screenshot

Shoppers in the US and elsewhere are struggling to access Amazon's website as one of its biggest annual sales, Prime Day, gets under way.

Many reported the e-commerce platform had crashed, showing them only an error message that read: "sorry, something went wrong on our end".

The issues are centred on the US but are occurring on other continents too.

DownDetector.com, which tracks outages, said the problems began shortly after the sale kicked off at 15:00 in the US.

In a tweet, Amazon said it was working to resolve the issues.

According to reports, users have experienced errors on both the desktop site and the mobile app.

Some saw an error page featuring the "dogs of Amazon" and were unable to enter the site, while others could not enter specific product pages.

Some were unable to complete purchases at checkout, while others reported that the "deals" page and "Shop all deals" button had disappeared from the site.

Many shoppers reacted with irritation on Twitter.

According to DownDetector, most of the outages are centred on the US. However, it has also reported issues with Amazon's sites in Europe, Africa, South America, Russia, Asia and Australasia.

Others have reported experiencing problems with Amazon's video streaming services and its virtual assistant Alexa.

Image copyright DownDetector Image caption Most of the issues centre on the US, according to DownDetector

Amazon launched Prime Day in 2015 and by 2017 it was its second biggest shopping day, topped only by Cyber Monday.

The 36-hour event was projected to break records again this year, with industry analysts estimating the company could make at least $3.4bn (£2.6bn) in sales.

However, some warned the glitches could make it hard to achieve these numbers.

"The outage is especially problematic as many of Amazon's Prime deals are promoted for a set window of time - something that could cause a great deal of frustration for potential customers," GlobalData Retail Managing Director Neil Saunders told CNBC.