Amazon Crashes on Prime Day

Amazon's Prime Day has been heavily advertised for weeks.

Amazon Prime Day just began today at 3 PM Eastern Time. With deals on hundreds of thousands of items, today was by no doubt the biggest sales day of Amazon's year. Amazon had a multimillion dollar advertising budget for Prime Day, and was aggressively publicizing the event in the weeks leading up to it. Yet on the most important day of the year, Amazon's website is down, and searching for items results in a 404 error that says "Something went wrong on our end." Amazon's stock dropped half a percent on Wall Street trading when news of this story hit.

This is especially ironic since Amazon is the owner of Amazon Web Services, famous for being able to adapt to increasing traffic and for its pay for what you use business model. In the midst of the the "cloud wars" between Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and IBM, this definitely does not look good for AWS, which has been steadily losing market share to rivals such as Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. This crash of Amazon is undoubtedly related to the increase in traffic due to Prime Day sales, with the website "Down Detector" reporting over 15,000 complaints regarding Amazon.com minutes after 3 PM Eastern Time, right when Prime Day began.

Current Down Detector Status

More than the negative PR surrounding this event Amazon will also be hit financially, as it is estimated that Amazon sells as much as $1 million a minute during Prime Day.
Following this event, Amazon has a couple of choices, including extending Prime Day, which they already have extended to 36 hours this year. So far, Amazon has not given any comment on the ongoing debacle and is hopefully working on a fix. So, for now, if you want to snag some of the fantastic deals Amazon is offering, your best bet is to keep clicking reloading on Amazon.com, or even better, go to Walmart.com or BestBuy.com and go to their "Prime Day" sales. Even if the prices are worse, at least you can actually buy something from them.

Update: Amazon's stock is down 1.5% in after hours trading.