Prime Day, an Ordering Success, Cripples Amazon Servers
Amazon acknowledged a “ruff start” to Prime Day Tuesday in an e-mailed statement after it resorted to cute puppy graphics when it was unable to handle the onslaught of traffic at launch Monday afternoon. “Some customers are having difficulty shopping,…
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and we’re working to resolve this issue quickly,” a spokeswoman emailed us. In the first hour and first 10 hours of Prime Day, U.S. customers ordered more items than at the equivalent points in 2017, she said. “We know some customers were temporarily unable to make purchases,” the company said, promising “hundreds of thousands of new deals today.” Amazon tried to reward Prime members with a “special thank you,” sending a Tuesday afternoon email offering a chance to download all six Amazon First Reads Kindle books for free through midnight. When we attempted to order, we encountered an error message akin to the fail messages reported Monday: “We're sorry! We had a problem processing your order. If you don't receive your book, please call our customer service line.” Other Prime users reported ordering glitches. Marist College promoted a June poll with NPR on Prime ownership in a Tuesday tweet: “44% of adults told @NPR/@MaristPoll they use Amazon Prime. They must have been pretty upset yesterday when @amazon site crashed on Prime Day!"