Amazon Prime Day 2018: Amazon crashes in the first few minutes of its biggest shopping day of the year, likely losing millions in sales
Amazon's website has been up and down since the start of Prime Day in the US at 3 p.m. Eastern.
When online, the website continued to experience issues like links that go nowhere, leaving customer unable to access the special deals.
Prime Day is one of Amazon's most important days of the year, when it hosts Black Friday-like deals in the middle of July.
Looks like Amazon wasn't primed for Prime Day this year.
Customers reported the retailer's website experienced issues at exactly the same time as the deals were scheduled to begin in the US at 3 p.m. eastern time, with the site appearing to be down and responding with a 404 error.
When online, the links on the main page advertising the Prime Day deals instead went nowhere — except to the main page itself. Pages within Amazon's mobile app were also affected, showing an apology error page.
RELATED: Prime Day's best deals on Amazon devices
Individual product pages appeared to not be affected and were still functional, though there were still issues involving adding items to carts for purchase.
Customers reacted with anger to the site issues, even going as far as to threaten cancelling their Prime memberships due to the problem. Many on social media posted pictures of the error pages with dogs on them to showcase the issues were ongoing.
The outage is likely due to the immense customer response to Prime Day, where Amazon promises Black Friday-like discounts in the middle of July. Business Insider has reached out to Amazon to find out the cause of the site issues.
One Click Retail estimates that Amazon sells about $1 million per minute during peak time on Prime Day, based on last year's data. The current issues could easily mean millions in lost sales, according to founder Spencer Millerberg.
At the time of writing, Amazon's website issues have lasted nearly an hour.
RELATED: Prime Day 2018's best tech gadgets under $100 (non-Amazon)
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