UPDATED 23:16 EDT / JULY 16 2018

APPS

Amazon Prime Day gets off to a rough start

Amazon.com Inc.’s 36-hour shopping bonanza Prime Day got off to a shaky start on Monday, with shoppers complaining of outages on the site along with other glitches.

Some of the reported issues were users getting stuck in frustrating loops, being asked to “Shop all deals” only to click through on that link and return to the “Shop all deals” page once again. Other issues were users getting to the checkout page and then facing an error page.

Amazon was quick to respond, tweeting that many people had no such problems and more items were sold in the first hour of this year than the first hour of last year’s Prime Day. The company did concede that “some customers are having difficulty shopping.”

The glitches were too much for some people writing on Twitter. Some thought the site issues were bigger than Amazon admitted and others said the situation was so bad that Amazon needed to extend the 36-hour period. Still others said it was time to cancel their Prime membership.

It’s believed Amazon will in fact do better this year than it did in 2017, with predictions that it will do $3.4 billion in sales versus last year’s $2.4 billion. But with the sheer number of complaints, it would seem the company is losing millions of dollars. As reported by Business Insider, it’s thought Amazon is selling about $1 million worth of items a minute at peak time on Prime Day, so outages are no small matter.

As users decry Amazon’s ability to keep their website working, over in Europe Amazon factory workers in Germany, Poland and Spain made a point of walking out of the job in protest of working conditions, according to Reuters.

Many thousands of Amazon workers will not work in Germany Tuesday, while in Spain it’s said about 1,800 workers went on strike Monday. In Poland, protesting workers have said they will do the bare minimum at work.

In a statement, Amazon said the strike would not affect Prime Day deliveries, adding that it “is a fair and responsible employer.” A few thousand workers walking out in Europe is more of a symbolic statement and likely will not cause Amazon too much harm.

Image: Amazon

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