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.
Processing Content
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.
John Adams is executive editor of payments for American Banker. John interviews top executives in the payments, cryptocurrency and fintech... Read full bio
Bankers are largely downplaying the impact of the Federal Reserve's interest rate increase. Some said this week that the quarter-point hike could be good for near-term profitability.
Credit Acceptance Corp. has agreed to provide $710 million in restitution and debt relief to resolve allegations of predatory lending by 41 state attorneys general.
The South Korean automaker's credit card subsidiary completed two proof-of-concept transactions that used stablecoins to move funds between subsidiaries in the U.S. and Mexico without a bank. Next, Hyundai Motor will test if the technology can be used as the backbone of its global treasury infrastructure.
Brokerages applaud a new rule that will relieve them of the obligation to monitor advisors' side gigs such as driving for Uber or bartending. But regulators say they still have plenty of obligations to monitor outside business activities.
