Amazon checkout process hits technical snag during Labor Day sale

A worker prepares packages at an Amazon same-day delivery fulfillment center on Prime Day in the Bronx borough of New York, US, on Tuesday, July 16, 2024. Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime Day sales rose about 13% in the first six hours of the event compared with the same period last year, according to Momentum Commerce, which manages 50 brands in a variety of product categories. Photographer: Stephanie Keith/Bloomberg via Getty Images

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Amazon’s checkout function encountered technical issues on Friday, keeping customers from completing purchases. The e-commerce site displayed error messages with photos of dogs during the outage as people posted about it on social media.

To run its website, Amazon relies on its own data center infrastructure. But the company’s Amazon Web Services division was not reporting any technical issues while the checkout feature wasn’t working. AWS downtime can lead to problems across the internet because so many companies rely on the market-leading public cloud.

An Amazon spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In the run-up to the long weekend in the U.S., Amazon has started promoting discounts on products as part of a Labor Day sale. But people weren’t able to purchase discounted products because of the glitch, as some people pointed out on the X social network.

The Amazon Help account on X replied with a recommendation to contact the company.

Amazon has warned investors that technical incidents can lead to lower sales and a worse perception of the company’s products and services. Sales are healthy at almost $148 billion in the second quarter.

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