Amazon's Site Crashes On Prime Day - Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN)

Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN’s virtual store suffered a virtual stampede on its virtual version of Black Friday.

What Happened

Online shoppers flocked to the site for more than 1 million Prime Day specials at the Amazon high holiday’s official 3 p.m. ET start. But as traffic likely surged toward an annual peak and orders flooded in, the overwhelmed website showed some visitors a vague error message conveying back-end issues.

“Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on fixing it,” the error message read beginning around 3:05 p.m.

The extent of the outage was unclear; some shoppers reported no issues, while others were unable to access anything, and still others could tap product pages but not the homepage. One map showed the heaviest impact in the northeast region of the U.S. with smaller issues across major cities.

Why It’s Important

Prime Day 2017 was Amazon’s largest sales day ever, beating out the 2016 holiday by 50 percent.

This year, though, management hopes to see a bigger impact and has even extended the sale six hours. Depending on the length of the outage, the impediment may stunt this year’s sales records.

Amazon's stock is up 80 percent since last year's Prime Day.

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