‘Tis the season for drone deliveries and Alexa queries: Amazon’s made-up holiday, Prime Day, was yesterday. But, this year’s Christmas-courtesy-of-Bezos kicked off with a major hitch.
Outages caused the e-commerce site to crash, causing premature gray hairs and headaches from Bezos to Boise and beyond.
An expensive outage
Amazon was projected to bring in $3.4B over the course of the 36-hour sale, meaning that every minute the site was down the company was potentially lost $1.57m in sales.
Prime Day started at 3pm ET. By 3:05pm ET, the site had crashed — leaving many shoppers stranded staring at pictures of ‘dogs of Amazon.’
In some areas, the troubles persisted for several hours, but by 5pm Amazon issued a statement saying that despite the ‘difficulty,’ shoppers were successfully back on the site spending.
A roller-coaster of a day for Bezos
Yesterday morning started out well for Bezos. Pre-Prime hype sent his personal fortune past $150B, making him the richest man in recent history.
Then, Amazon’s site crashed, dropping the company’s stock nearly 1% on a day when it was supposed to soar.
And, this subprime experience may not be the worst of Beezy’s worries: 1.8k Spanish Amazon workers also went on strike yesterday, with more employees across Europe expected to walk out today. So even though your Prime day headache may be over, Jeff is keeping the Advil close.