Deals! Deals! Deals! It’s the time of year when an even larger-than-average group of people choose to spend money on shit they don’t need to enrich the single richest man on the planet. Except this year, in addition to warehouse workers and consumers themselves, Amazon’s own website seems to be protesting the grueling workload of fulfilling our collective consumption.
That’s right—for a large number of shoppers, Amazon.com is down. Unreachable. Totally borked. And the ecommerce site cum streaming service cum wind energy firm cum, uh, facial recognition hell-chimera has no one to blame but itself, since one of the slivers of its vast portfolio speculated to actually be profitable—Amazon Web Services—is what powers the damn thing.
Instead, distraught buyers of things have been greeted by either an endless, hyperlink purgatory or error messages accompanied by an array of Pretty Good Dogs. (All dogs are good, even if they serve the needs of billionaires.)
Welcome comrades Waffles, Martini, Peek, and Rupert. Thank you for your service.
Update 7/16/18 5:19pm ET: Amazon provided the following statement to Gizmodo (which is the exact same one it posted to its official Twitter account some 20 minutes prior):
Some customers are having difficulty shopping, and we’re working to resolve this issue quickly. Many are shopping successfully – in the first hour of Prime Day in the U.S., customers have ordered more items compared to the first hour last year. There are hundreds of thousands of deals to come and more than 34 hours to shop Prime Day.