Amazon's site suffered outages and a warehouse strike at start of Amazon Prime Day, issues that could cost the company millions in revenue, even if they are short lived.
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There were numerous news and social media reports on the outage, with additional reports of people seeing images of Amazon workers' pets (Amazon's version of a 404 message). Amazon had not put out a public statement as of 5 PM ET, and the web was filled with complaints about people unable to make payments or navigate Amazon far beyond the landing page. Amazon sells about $1 million per minute on Prime Day, so the losses could be staggering. The New York Daily News reports about 24,000 people had problems accessing Amazon.
A student is reflected in the window of an Amazon.com Inc. kiosk on the University of California, Berkeley campus in Berkeley, California, U.S., on Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2016. By the end of the year, Amazon will have staffed pickup kiosks serving more than 500,000 college students at 16 schools around the country. Students order items from Amazon.com Inc. and retrieve them from new pickup lockers. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
The outage also comes at the same time as a strike at Amazon warehouses in Spain, with additional strikes scheduled for Tuesday in Germany and Poland. There were 1,800 workers off the job as of Monday, though there were no signs that the strike and outage were related.
Amazon Prime Day is a marketing "holiday" that aims to expand Amazon Prime membership, a $119 subscription that's a major part of Amazon's marketing strategy at its core site and Whole Foods.
It's been a bad summer for transaction glitches, as Visa and Mastercard have both suffered outages that left people unable to make purchases.
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