Amazon crashed in the first few minutes of its biggest shopping day of the year, losing millions in sales (AMZN)

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July 16, 2018 8:43 PM

Prime Day is one of the busiest day of the year for Amazon, but its website briefly crashed and experienced other issues at the start.

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.

The outage was 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.

This story is developing.

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